Transcription
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 overclaiming bias? Is that one way to detect narcissism? So, I don't know about the sneaky part. Maybe there are some subtle ways. And overclaiming, maybe a way to detect narcissism relatively quickly, but it doesn't detect all narcissists, and I'll talk about that more in a bit.
So, to understand this, let's take a look at the concept of overclaiming. What is overclaiming bias? Well, people overclaim 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 Overclaiming 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. Twelve 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 megafreenia, pallstacks, 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 6 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 foils.
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 overclaiming bias and narcissism. Some theorists have suggested that the narcissistic tendency to be self-centered and inauthentic is related to overclaiming bias. But some research has found that overclaiming 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. Overclaiming 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. Narcissists believe 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 to whether narcissism is 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 and 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.
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 overclaiming bias, but antagonistic and vulnerable narcissism would not be.
Moving back to assertive narcissism, we see with this type of narcissism, there are certain abilities that tend to be promoted, right? There are 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 Overclaiming Questionnaire really capture these areas? Could it even detect overclaiming 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 Overclaiming Questionnaire, but we really don't see anything, of course, related to social dominance or physical attractiveness. But either way, it looks like the Overclaiming Questionnaire could capture something useful in terms of a sort of narcissism.
So, what do we see in terms of research findings? Well, we see that narcissism is not necessarily strongly related to overclaiming bias. It really depends on what type of narcissism we're talking about. Assertive narcissism does have a somewhat strong positive correlation to overclaiming 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 overclaiming bias than narcissistic intelligence, which is really unexpected because the Overclaiming 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 overclaiming is used by narcissists 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 there sneaky and fast ways to detect a narcissist? And what about overclaiming? Well, we see something like the Overclaiming 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 from research, though, that narcissists in general do tend to overclaim more than non-narcissists, even when the questionnaire is given anonymously. And this effect is still present even in groups who are warned about the foils, even when they know that the foils are in there. Now, in this notification, it takes place when people know about the foils. The overclaiming is reduced, right? We don't see the overclaiming bias as strong, but the difference is still there. Narcissists still overclaim 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 Overclaiming Questionnaire works well. It does tend to detect narcissists, 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?" or "Are you as annoyed by pallstacks as I am?" or maybe something like, "Is it just me, or does that delivery driver remind you of Queen Alberta?" Right? This is not gonna work. This is not the same thing as the Overclaiming 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 foils, 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, megafreenia 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, overclaiming 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 overclaiming 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 overclaiming bias to be interesting. Thanks for watching.