Perceptions of narcissism in college professors

ABSTRACT

We conducted three studies to examine perceptions of grandiose narcissism in college professors. Narcissism might appear incompatible with the profession if professors are viewed fundamentally as helpers or as introverted bookworms. Then again, people might expect professors to display big egos congruent with the prestige of their profession and their privileged public platforms. Our research indicates that professors are generally not seen as highly narcissistic according to the criteria of the Narcissistic Personality Inventory and the Narcissistic Admiration and Rivalry Questionnaire, though they are viewed as more narcissistic than elementary school teachers. More professor narcissism was expected at colleges that prioritize scholarly productivity over teaching excellence. Male professors were viewed as more narcissistic, but only for narcissism dimensions associated with interpersonal hostility and for judgments of whether professors are “narcissistic.” We discuss possible implications for narcissistic professors’ ability to exploit the gap between academic ideals and reward system realities.

KEYWORDS:

• Narcissism
• professor
• teaching
• academia
• stereotype

Acknowledgments

We thank Kelsi Ballard, Alexandra Gonzalez-Van Wart, Anna Hagee, Elizabeth Peters, Stephanie Simon, Zack Speer, and Brigitte Taylor for contributing to the research from which this paper emerged.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Ethical approval

All procedures performed in studies involving human participants were in accordance with the ethical standards of the institutional and/or national research committee (Trinity University Institutional Review Board) and with the 1964 Helsinki declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards

Informed consent

Informed consent was obtained from all individual participants included in the study.

Data availability statement

The data described in this article are openly available in the Open Science Framework at https://osf.io/tpa6u.

Open Scholarship

This article has earned the Center for Open Science badges for Open Data and Open Materials through Open Practices Disclosure. The data and materials are openly accessible at https://osf.io/xtqyn.

Research materials

Survey content and SPSS datasets for each study can be accessed online: https://osf.io/xtqyn

Notes

1. Our research focused on perceptions of grandiose narcissism rather than vulnerable narcissism for two reasons. First, our interest in perceptions of narcissistic professors arose initially from speculations about possible advantages associated with being a narcissistic professor. Such advantages seem plausible if not likely for grandiose narcissism, but vulnerable narcissism is almost inherently disadvantageous. Second, we had no basis for thinking people might associate professors with the dysfunctional traits that distinguish vulnerable narcissism from grandiose narcissism.

2. College experience was considered as a two-level factor (some form of college degree or not) added to all ANOVA models reported in this paper. No effects of college experience were observed.

3. Deriving meaning from comparing responses to scale midpoints is potentially fraught, because the midpoint could be rendered irrelevant by psychometric biases pushing responses in a particular direction. We nonetheless highlight how means compare with scale midpoints here and elsewhere in this paper because the information attained from the comparison seemed noteworthy and because we are unaware of a particular applicable bias that would predictably invalidate our midpoint comparisons.

4. Our (a priori) participant exclusion criteria became increasingly more stringent over the course of our three studies partly because we added more tools for screening participants (attention checks and open-ended comment opportunities) and partly because we became more sensitive to markers of potential problems in M-Turk samples. Our research was conducted in April 2015 (Study 1), May 2018 (Study 2), and September 2018 (Study 3).

5. Decisions to use various combinations of between- and within-subjects designs in our studies were driven fundamentally by our desire to maximize measurement breadth and statistical power within surveys requiring fewer than 10 min to complete. We opted for within-subjects designs if the timing of survey administration could accommodate and if the item redundancy and independent variable transparency seemed unproblematic.

6. Participant age correlated negatively with target narcissism ratings across conditions in all three studies. When participant narcissism was measured (in Study 2 and Study 3), participant age correlated negatively with participant narcissism, a typical finding in the narcissism literature (e.g., Foster et al., 2003; Roberts et al., 2010). Controlling for participant narcissism eliminated the participant age effects on narcissism judgments, but controlling for age did not substantially affect the positive relationship between participant narcissism and target narcissism judgments.

Additional information

Funding

The author(s) reported there is no funding associated with the work featured in this article.

Notes on contributors

Harry M. Wallace

Harry Wallace is an Associate Professor of Psychology at Trinity University in San Antonio, TX. He earned a Ph.D. in Experimental Social Psychology from Case Western Reserve University and a B.A. in English from Fairfield University. His scholarship includes research examining narcissists’ task performance and persistence across contexts and highlighting features of narcissists’ self-views and perceptions of others.