Characterizing Pathological Narcissism in Terms of the HEXACO Model of Personality

This study investigated the grandiose and vulnerable subscales of the Pathological Narcissism Inventory (PNI; Pincus et al. (Psychological Assessment, 21, 365-379, 2009)) in the context of the HEXACO model of personality. Based upon previous research, we predicted that grandiose aspects of narcissism would be related to high extraversion, low emotionality, and low agreeableness, while vulnerable aspects of narcissism would be associated with low extraversion, high emotionality, and low agreeableness (Miller and Campbell (Journal of Personality, 76, 449-476, 2008)). We also examined whether the honesty-humility domain helped differentiate between the two aspects of narcissism. We predicted that grandiose aspects of narcissism would be related to low levels of honesty-humility because of a tendency to exploit others, while vulnerable aspects of narcissism would be unrelated to honesty-humility. Our predictions were supported for the vulnerable subscale of the PNI for both zero-order and partial effects. However, for the grandiose subscale, our predictions were only supported when controlling for covariance between the PNI subscales and the HEXACO domains.