Sneaky Ways to Detect Narcissism? | Overclaiming Bias & Foils

welcome to my scientifically informed insider look at mental health topics if you find this video to be interesting or helpful please like it and subscribe to my channel oh this is dr. Grande today's question asks are there sneaky and fast ways to detect a narcissist and I also have another question how about over claiming bias is that one way to detect narcissism so I don't know about the sneaky part maybe there's some subtle ways and over claiming maybe a way to detect narcissism relatively quickly but it doesn't detect all narcisse's and I'll talk about that more in a bit so to understand this let's take a look at the concept of over claiming what is over claiming bias well people over claim when they demonstrate a tendency to claim knowledge about non-existent items these non-existent items are referred to as foils one way to test this is with an instrument called the over claiming questionnaire so I'll describe briefly how this questionnaire functions so this questionnaire has six categories on it with 15 items in each category so the six categories are physical sciences authors and characters 20th century names historical names and events books and poems and social science and law so again 15 items in each of these six categories 12 of the items are real so using the social science and the law category we see items like nationalism super-ego and Oedipus complex all those of course are real terms so again we have 12 items like that that are real then we see three items that are foils three items that are non-existent items in the case of the social science and law we see mega free Nia pall stacks and consumer apparatus those three things aren't real things so the person taking the questionnaire is asked to rate their familiarity from 0 to 6 with each of these items so 0 would be never heard of it which of course would be the expected response with the foils and six is very familiar with it so we can see from this rating how much they are stating that they're familiar with these different items that are real and the items that are whales so this questionnaire is used to measure self enhancement and of course self enhancement is considered a key feature of narcissism now a number of studies have found positive relationships between over claiming bias and narcissism some theorists have suggested that the narcissistic tendency to be self-centered and inauthentic is related to over claiming bias but some research has found that over claiming bias was predicted by the number of years of formal education and by the personality trait openness to experience but not by narcissism so we really see mixed findings here over claiming bias may be better explained by carelessness just carelessly responding to items as opposed to narcissism or self-deception which of course is a core feature of narcissism narcissist believed that they are great they're not just trying to convince others that it's true so what's going on here right we see mixed findings as narcissism related or not so to understand this relationship we have to understand the types of narcissism so the two types of narcissism are grandiose and vulnerable with grandiose we see characteristics like being extroverted socially dominant resistant to criticism having a superficial charm with vulnerable we see characteristics like having a lot of shame being resentful and being pessimistic now grandiose narcissism can be further divided into assertive antagonistic so we have assertive antagonistic and vulnerable if we look at it this way so with assertive narcissism we see this is characterized by promoting oneself in order to reach goals like being superior having power or having status antagonistic is related to devaluing other people cheating and harming other people again to attain narcissistic goals so this is done instead of using self enhancement so essentially with assertive narcissism you move yourself up to feel better and with antagonistic narcissism you move others down so the idea behind self enhancement is that people believe that their fantasies are coming true and they have high self esteem so if we think about it people who are high in antagonistic and vulnerable narcissism would not engage in a lot of self enhancement putting others down is not self enhancement having shame is not consistent with self enhancement so they have low self esteem and they do not think their fantasies are being realized so maybe assertive narcissism would be related to over claiming bias but antagonistic and vulnerable narcissism would not be so moving back to assertive narcissism we see with this type of narcissism there are certain abilities that tend to be promoted right there's ways that we can spot this type of narcissism intellectual ability social dominance and physical attractiveness are these areas that tend to be promoted and these are fairly straightforward with intellectual ability we see that narcissists believe that they are extraordinarily intelligent with the social dominance the narcissists view themselves as having extraordinary leadership qualities we actually see this one quite a lot many narcissists talk about leadership we also see of course physical attractiveness and this is when a narcissist believes that anybody would find them incredibly physically attractive so with this in mind knowing these areas that we really see here around self enhancement and assertive narcissism does the over claiming questionnaire really capture these areas could it even detect over claiming related to those areas well the answer here is partially yes the intellectual ability part would be covered by the categories we see on the over claiming questionnaire but we really don't see anything of course related to social dominance or physical attractiveness but either way it looks like the over claiming questionnaire could capture something useful in terms of a sort of narcissism so what do we see in terms research findings well we see that narcissism is not necessarily strongly related to over claiming bias it really depends on what type of narcissism we're talking about assertive narcissism does have a somewhat strong positive correlation to over claiming bias certainly stronger than what we see with antagonistic or vulnerable narcissism so something interesting in all this the narcissistic social dominance area that I talked about it's a better predictor of over claiming bias than narcissistic intelligence which is really unexpected because the over claiming questionnaire really seemed to focus more on areas related to intelligence now that social dominance area is related to driving for influence status and social potency so it appears that over claiming is used by narcissist to enhance or maybe maintain their status as opposed to increasing their self-esteem so with all this in mind moving back to the original questions are they're sneaky and fast ways to detect a narcissist and what about over claiming well we see something like the over claiming questionnaire does seem to give us a way to detect assertive narcissism reasonably well which of course is not very helpful because this type of narcissism is relatively easy to spot we also see for research though that narcissists in general do tend to over claimed more than non narcissists even when the questionnaire is given anonymously and this effect is still present even in groups are warned about the foils even when they know that the foils are in there now in this notification takes place when people know about the foils the over claiming is reduced right we don't see the over claiming bias as strong but the difference is still there narcissist still over claimed more which leads us to believe that narcissists again really believe what they're saying this is an unconscious automatic action and really part of the self-deception that I talked about before so here's the problem the over claiming questionnaire works well it does tend to detect nurse but it's used in research it can't be used in normal social situations it's a valuable tool on a large scale in researching narcissism but it can't be converted for use on a small scale now on occasion we see that people do try to throw out foils in normal conversation right I've seen this happen a few times so use some examples here these aren't examples I've actually seen people do I'm just making these up but you could picture something like have you heard of the plates of parallax are you as annoyed by pulse tax as I am or maybe something like is it just me or is that delivery driver reminds you of Queen Alberta right this is not gonna work this is not the same thing as the over claiming questionnaire it's not the same thing as the test for several reasons right the test is longer it has valid items on there as well as the foils but it's also socially acceptable just to say yes to something like that to keep the conversation moving forward so somebody may indicate familiarity with an item that they're not really familiar with just to have that conversation keep going or maybe to have the conversation end maybe just to get the conversation over with it doesn't necessarily indicate narcissism when used that way one thing I have noticed on a casual level about the use of oils though is when a narcissist is caught when you say to them hey that was the foil and you said you recognized it they tend to defend the familiarity that they indicated right so they might say no mega free nia is a real disorder I know someone who had it or they might say that they misheard what you said like oh I thought you said schizophrenia instead of admitting that they were caught and again this is just anecdotal I've just noticed this in my clinical experience and in other situations so again when looking at all this over claiming bias might be useful to measure on a scale like in research or something like that but it's not going to be really effective on a day to day basis in the interactions that people have like in social situations and in other situations so I know whenever I talk about topics like this like narcissism and over claiming bias there'll be a variety of opinions people who agree with me disagree with me and have other thoughts and examples from their own lives please put those opinions and thoughts in the comments section they always generate a really interesting dialogue as always I hope you found this description of over claiming bias to be interesting thanks for watching

Channel: Dr. Todd Grande

Views: 53,613

Keywords: Overclaiming bias, foils, narcissism, narcissistic, narcissistic personality disorder, overclaiming questionnaire, physical sciences, authors and characters, 20th century names, historical names and events, books and poems, social science and the law megaphrenia, pulse tax, consumer apparatus, plates of parallax, Queen Alberta

Id: ibWeGnSiED0

Length: 11min 26sec (686 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 15 2019