Implicit measures of narcissism
To assess narcissism, as well as many other characteristics of people, participants are often asked to answer a series of questions about themselves, such as “I like to be the centre of attention”. In these instances, the purpose of these questions, called self-report tests or explicit measures, are somewhat transparent.
Two issues compromise the validity and utility of these explicit measures. First, individuals are sometimes oblivious to their characteristics, unable to access this information from memory (Grum & von Collani, 2007). Second, participants often distort their responses, often to appear more appealing (Greenwald et al., 1998). The implicit association test is a paradigm that researchers often use to circumvent these problems.
Illustration: Rapid serial visual presentation
One procedure, called the rapid serial visual presentation, can be used to assess narcissism implicitly. For example, Atkinson and Heerey (2025) designed a method that assesses the degree to which individuals are attuned to words that epitomise status. The rationale of this procedure is that individuals who are sensitive to these words may be especially concerned about status—indicative of narcissism.
Specifically, on each trial, participants watch sequences of strings, each appearing for only 120 ms. A typical sequence of strings might be
- SFKLJHFAJKSDHFA
- XXXXXTABLEXXXX
- ADFGKJHADFGAS
- SDFJKHSADFJDJH
- XXXXXFAMEXXXX
- SDFASDFKJLHJHJ
After they watch this sequence of 6 strings, participants indicate whether they identified any words. In this sequence, two of the strings were presented in a bold font. In addition, embedded within these strings were two words: table and fame. If people notice the first word, they tend to overlook the second word—especially if this second word appears within 300 ms of the first word. However, participants may identify the second word in some circumstances, such as if this term is especially relevant to their motives. Accordingly, participants may be more likely to identify the second term if
- this term is related to status, such as fame, power, wealth, and leader,
- the participants exhibit the signs of narcissism.
Atkinson and Heerey (2025) did indeed substantiate this possibility. That is, in this study, participants completed a range of personality scales, including the Narcissistic Admiration and Rivalry Questionnaire. If participants scored high on this scale, indicating narcissism, they were more likely to identify the second word—even when this term followed the first word within 240 ms—provided this second term was relevant to status.
