Narcissistic Acts in Everyday Life

This article presents a series of studies on narcissism, a personality syndrome receiving increasing theoretical and practical attention. Four empirical studies were carried out to (a) identify narcissistic acts in everyday life, (b) identify the acts subsumed by dispositions that are seen as central components of narcissism, (c) identify which acts and which dispositions are most and least central to narcissism, (d) test the hypothesis that the conceptually specified component dispositions of the narcissistic personality disorder indeed covary sufficiently to merit the designation of narcissism as a syndrome, (e) identify sex differences in the acts through which narcissism is manifested, (f) validate the Narcissistic Personality Inventory (a major personality instrument developed to assess narcissism), and (g) locate narcissistic act performance within each of three major taxonomies of personality psychology.