Do Today's Young People Really Think They Are So Extraordinary? An Examination of Secular Trends in Narcissism and Self-Enhancement

Abstract

The present research investigated secular trends in narcissism and self-enhancement over the past three decades. Despite recent claims about the impact of the "self-esteem movement" on the current generation of young people, we found no evidence that college students' scores on the Narcissistic Personality Inventory increased from the 1980s through 2007 (N= 26,867), although we did find small changes in specific facets of narcissism. Similarly, we found no evidence that high school students' level of self-enhancement, defined by the discrepancy between their perceived intelligence and their actual academic achievements, increased from 1976 to 2006 (N= 410,527). These results cast doubt on the belief that today's young people have increasingly inflated impressions of themselves compared with previous generations.

Full text

Research Article
Do Today’s Young People
Really Think They Are So
Extraordinary?
An Examination of Secular Trends in Narcissism and
Self-Enhancement
Kali H. Trzesniewski,
1
M. Brent Donnellan,
2
and Richard W. Robins
3
1
The University of Western Ontario,
2
Michigan State University, and
3
University of California, Davis
ABSTRACT—The present research investigated secular trends
in narcissism and self-enhancement over the past three
decades. Despite recent claims about the impact of the
‘‘self-esteem movement’’ on the current generation of
young people, we found no evidence that college students’
scores on the Narcissistic Personality Inventory increased
from the 1980s through 2007 (N526,867), although we
did find small changes in specific facets of narcissism.
Similarly, we found no evidence that high school students’
level of self-enhancement, defined by the discrepancy
between their perceived intelligence and their actual
academic achievements, increased from 1976 to 2006
(N5410,527). These results cast doubt on the belief that
today’s young people have increasingly inflated impres-
sions of themselves compared with previous generations.
All evidence suggests that narcissism is much more common in
recent generations.
—Twenge (2006, p. 69)
I’ve been a professor at Emory University for the past twenty years, and
I interrelate with a wide range of students. Whether they are going to be
ministers or teachers or social scientists or lawyers or doctors, I don’t
detect that this generation is any more committed to personal gain to
the exclusion of benevolent causes than others have been in the past.
—Former President Jimmy Carter, interviewed by Tom Brokaw
(Brokaw, 2007, p. 58)
Several decades ago, California State Congressman John
Vasconcellos, who referred to himself as the ‘‘Johnny Appleseed
of self-esteem,’’ spearheaded a movement to create school pro-
grams designed to improve self-esteem (Mecca, Smelser, &
Vasconcellos, 1989). This movement came under attack almost
immediately and continues to be attacked today (Baumeister,
Campbell, Krueger, & Vohs, 2003; Hewitt, 1998; Seligman,
1995; Twenge, 2006). Although well-designed self-esteem in-
terventions can have positive effects on children’s outcomes
(e.g., Haney & Durlak, 1998; O’Mara, Marsh, Craven, & Debus,
2006), the Vasconcellos-inspired school programs often lacked
precise implementation and grounding in research. Many of
these programs seemed to emphasize feeling good over achiev-
ing, giving awards and good grades to all students even in the
absence of real achievements. Similarly, American culture is
stereotyped as being overly focused on seeking high self-esteem
at all costs (e.g., Crocker & Park, 2004; Heine, Lehman, Markus,
& Kitayama, 1999). As a result, there is widespread concern that
the American ‘‘feel good culture’’ and the self-esteem programs
it spawned have inadvertently produced a generation of young
narcissists.
Most notably, Twenge (2006) has characterized Americans
born in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s as ‘‘Generation Me,’’ a label
selected to capture their purported tendency to be more ego-
tistical, entitled, and overconfident than previous generations,
presumably because they grew up in this ‘‘culture of self-worth.’’
Media reports based on Twenge, Konrath, Foster, Campbell, and
Bushman’s (in press) forthcoming analysis of generational
changes in average scores on the Narcissistic Personality In-
ventory (NPI; Raskin & Terry, 1988) have further disseminated
the idea that America’s youth are increasingly narcissistic (e.g.,
Address correspondence to Kali Trzesniewski, Department of Psy-
chology, The University of Western Ontario, London, ON, Canada
N6A 5C2, e-mail: k.trz@uwo.ca.
PSYCHOLOGICAL SCIENCE
Volume 19—Number 2 181Copyright r2008 Association for Psychological Science

Associated Press, 2007). Coverage of this work has been wide-
spread, appearing in high-profile media outlets such as the At-
lantic Monthly,CBS News, and National Public Radio as well as
in major newspapers such as the Boston Globe, the Los Angeles
Times, and the Washington Post.
The purpose of this report is to examine the evidence for the
claim that today’s young people are more self-centered and self-
aggrandizing than young people of previous generations. We
analyzed secular changes in narcissism using large samples of
undergraduate students from northern California, the geo-
graphic epicenter of the self-esteem movement. In addition, we
examined secular changes in one prominent manifestation of
narcissism, self-enhancement (i.e., the tendency to hold unre-
alistically positive beliefs about the self), using data from the
college-student samples and from the Monitoring the Future
project (Johnston, Bachman, & O’Malley, 2003), a large national
probability study of high school seniors conducted annually
since 1976.
Why might narcissism and self-enhancement be increasing
in recent generations? A number of social commentators have
noted a shift in American culture from communitarian values
and strong social ties toward an emphasis on individualism and
the pursuit of one’s own needs (e.g., Bellah, Madsen, Sullivan,
Swidler, & Tipton, 1985; Lasch, 1979; Putnam, 2000).
1
These
social values are thought to shape individual personality char-
acteristics. As noted by Lasch (1979), ‘‘Every society repro-
duces its culture—its norms, its underlying assumptions, its
modes of organizing experience—in the individual, in the form
of personality’’ (p. 76). It is difficult to devise models that explain
the processes through which broad societal trends affect per-
sonality (Stewart & Healy, 1989). However, identifying changes
in personality associated with birth cohort is an important first
step.
Unfortunately, identifying cohort effects is empirically chal-
lenging (e.g., Costa & McCrae, 1982; Schaie, 1965).
2
One ap-
proach, pioneered by Twenge and her colleagues (Twenge, 2000;
Twenge & Campbell, 2001), is to conduct a cross-temporal meta-
analysis in which changes in average personality scores are
examined as a function of date of data collection. Using this
methodology, Twenge et al. (in press) found that the average NPI
score has increased steadily in college students since the scale
was first administered in 1982. Although this is an important
application of meta-analytic techniques, the results are none-
theless constrained by limitations in the sampling procedures
used in the original studies. The college-student samples in-
cluded in the meta-analysis were mostly small and perhaps
subject to selection biases; thus, we believe that it is informative
to examine secular trends in narcissism and self-enhancement
in large samples of prescreening data and in a nationally rep-
resentative sample.
In the present study, we tested the hypothesis that narcissism
levels are increasing by comparing mean scores on the NPI
using data collected on college students in the 1980s, 1990s,
and 2000s. The NPI (Raskin & Hall, 1979) was designed to
assess personality characteristics associated with the clinical
definition of narcissistic personality disorder in the third edition
of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.
These attributes include a grandiose sense of importance, a
preoccupation with power and success, exhibitionism, arro-
gance, exploitativeness, and a sense of entitlement. The NPI is
the most widely used and well-validated measure of subclinical
levels of narcissism and has been shown to predict psycholo-
gists’ ratings of narcissism (John & Robins, 1994). Thus, the NPI
provides one of the best ways to measure whether or not today’s
college students exhibit more narcissistic tendencies than pre-
vious generations. To complement our analysis of secular trends
in the NPI, we also examined trends in self-enhancement, a
construct that is associated with narcissism (John & Robins,
1994; Paulhus, 1998). We operationalized self-enhancement as
the discrepancy between participants’ ratings of their intelli-
gence and more objective indicators of their intellectual ability
(SAT scores and grade point average, or GPA). If young people
have been getting more narcissistic over the past three decades,
then the degree to which they overestimate their ability should
have been increasing as well.
METHOD
Narcissism
We used data drawn from mass testing sessions of introductory
psychology students conducted at the University of California,
Davis and Berkeley campuses, in 1996 and annually from 2002
to 2007. We restricted the analyses to the 25,849 students be-
tween 18 and 24 years of age (Mdn 519, SD 51.40) who
completed the 40-item forced-choice version of the NPI (alpha
reliability ranged from .84 to .85 across years). We selected
students who were of traditional college age to provide a cleaner
test of the cohort-effect hypothesis. The sample was 66.3% fe-
male; 39.7% were Asian American, 30.9% were Caucasian,
2.2% were African American, 9.4% were Hispanic, and 17.8%
were of mixed or other races or did not state their ethnic back-
ground. To extend ourtest of secular trends, we compared means
from the 1990s and 2000s with means first published by Raskin
and Terry (1988); these means were based on 1,018 participants
(52.5% female) who completed the NPI between 1979 and 1985.
1
However, a shift toward increasing individualism might not be unique to the
20th and 21st centuries. Historical research on the family has identified in-
creases in individualism as far back as 17th-century England (see Cherlin,
1983).
2
Differences between samples could represent an effect of time of mea-
surement, rather than a cohort effect. For example, in the present case, indi-
viduals of all ages assessed in the 1980s could have higher narcissism scores
than individuals of all ages assessed in the 1990s or 2000s (e.g., because of
something about the social milieu at the time of assessment).
182 Volume 19—Number 2
Secular Changes in Narcissism

Self-Enhancement
To track secular trends in self-enhancement, we used data
from two sources. First, in the mass testing sessions conducted
at the University of California between 2003 and 2007
(self-enhancement data were not available in the 1996 and 2002
assessments), students were asked to ‘‘rate your intelligence
compared to the general population,’’ using a scale ranging from
1(bottom 5%)to10(top 5%). To gauge self-enhancement, we
computed the degree to which self-perceived intelligence was
higher than objective indicators of academic ability (SATscores
and college GPA).
3
Specifically, we conducted multiple re-
gression analyses (using data from all assessment years, i.e.,
from 2003 through 2007) in which each indicator of ability was
regressed on the self-ratings of intelligence and the unstan-
dardized residuals were retained. Because the two resulting self-
enhancement indices—one based on SAT scores and the other
based on GPA—were almost perfectly correlated (r5.90), we
computed a single combined index by entering both academic
criteria simultaneously into a multiple regression predicting
self-rated intelligence and then saving the unstandardized re-
siduals. Positive values indicate self-enhancement (i.e., over-
estimation by the self), and negative values indicate self-
diminishment (i.e., underestimation by the self). Residual
scores have been widely used to assess self-enhancement (John
& Robins, 1994; Paulhus, 1998; Robins & John, 1997). In this
sample, self-enhancement correlated .27 with NPI score, a
finding consistent with previous research (e.g., Robins & John,
1997).
Second, we examined long-term trends in self-enhancement
using data from the Monitoring the Future project (Johnston et
al., 2003), a very large national probability study of high school
seniors conducted annually since 1976 (total Nacross the 30
years used in these analyses 5410,527; 50.7% female; detailed
information about the sample can be found on the Web at http://
www.monitoringthefuture.org/). Every year from 1976 to 2006,
high school seniors were asked, ‘‘How intelligent do you think
you are compared to others your own age?’’ This item was rated
from 1 (far below average)to7(far above average). To assess
self-enhancement bias, we used an unstandardized residual
score (computed via regression using data from all years) re-
flecting the discrepancy between self-perceived intelligence
and high school grades; standardized-test scores were not
available in the Monitoring the Future data, but given the .90
correlation between self-enhancement based on grades and self-
enhancement based on SAT scores in the University of Califor-
nia data, it is unlikely that the secular trends would have been
different if test scores had been used as a criterion instead of
grades. Because of privacy issues associated with publicly
available data, ethnicity was coded as White or non-White
(83.4% White).
RESULTS
Secular Trends in Narcissism
Table 1 shows the means and standard deviations by year of data
collection for the full-scale NPI. Given the large sample sizes,
we focus on effect sizes rather than significance levels. We
discuss all effects that meet or surpass Cohen’s (1988) guideline
of a small effect (i.e., an rof .10 or a dof 0.20).
Year of data collection (from 1996 to 2007) was uncorrelated
with full-scale NPI score (r5.01).
4
Given the lack of time trend
in these data, we computed the average score on the NPI for all
participants from 1996 through 2007 and compared this ag-
gregate score to that reported by Raskin and Terry (1998). This
comparison provides a direct test of the cohort hypothesis be-
cause it compares Generation Me (i.e., members of our sample
were all born after 1971) with previous generations (i.e., par-
ticipants in Raskin and Terry’s study were all born before 1969).
As Table 1 shows, there was a very small difference (d50.06)
between NPI means computed in our data (Generation Me) and
in Raskin and Terry’s original data. To further illustrate the ef-
fects, we standardized all NPI scores from 1996 through 2007 to
Raskin and Terry’s mean and standard deviation. These average
standardized scores are plotted by year in Figure 1. As the figure
shows, all of the means from 1996 through 2007 were slightly
below Raskin and Terry’s average (e.g., the largest standardized
difference was 0.10, for scores in 2002, N53,117). Thus, we
found no evidence for a secular increase in NPI scores among
college students from the 1980s to the 2000s, and if anything, we
found weak support for a secular decline.
5
Gender, ethnicity, and age did not moderate the time trend
(none of the interaction terms accounted for more than 0.1% of
the variance), although we did find some main effects. Men (M5
0.41) had higher narcissism scores than women (M50.37; d5
0.24), and Caucasians (M50.39) had higher narcissism scores
than Asian Americans (M50.34; d50.29). Age was uncor-
related with NPI scores in this age-restricted sample (r5.01).
It is possible that specific aspects of narcissism have in-
creased over time while others have decreased, producing no
3
The SAT provides a good proxy for general intelligence. For example, Frey
and Detterman (2004) found a correlation of .82 between SAT scores and a
measure of g(or general intelligence) derived from the Armed Services Voca-
tional Aptitude Battery in a large sample from the National Longitudinal Survey
of Youth.
4
The participant’s year of birth (range: 1972–1989) was also uncorrelated
with NPI score (r5.01).
5
Although these data come from multiple University of California campus-
es—Raskin and Terry’s data from Berkeley and Santa Cruz, the 1996 data from
Berkeley, and the 2002–2007 data from Davis—the campuses do not seem to
vary systematically in mean levels of narcissism. For example, Ames, Rose, and
Anderson (2006) recently reported a mean NPI score of 0.39 (SD 50.17) in a
large prescreening sample of undergraduates at Berkeley (Study 1; N5776),
and this mean is identical to Raskin and Terry’s mean, as well as to the mean
NPI score in the most recent assessment at Davis.
Volume 19—Number 2 183
Kali H. Trzesniewski, M. Brent Donnellan, and Richard W. Robins

aggregate change at the full-scale level. However, an examin-
ation of time trends from 1996 to 2007 for NPI subscales created
by Emmons (1987) and by Raskin and Terry (1988) provided no
evidence for changes in specific aspects of narcissism (r5
.01–.02 for correlations between subscale scores and year of
data collection). Nonetheless, we found a few differences when
comparing the subscale means for 1996 through 2007 with
subscale means from 1979 through 1985 reported by Raskin and
Terry. As Table 1 shows, scores on four subscales decreased
(Authority, Exhibitionism, Superiority, and Vanity), and scores
on three increased (Entitlement, Exploitiveness, and Self-
Sufficiency), although the largest effect size was a decline of only
a third of a standard deviation in Superiority.
Secular Trends in Self-Enhancement
We found no evidence that self-enhancement changed over time
in either sample; the correlation (r) between self-enhancement
and year of data collection was .02 and .03, respectively, for
the University of California sample (2003–2007) and the Mon-
itoring the Future sample (1976–2006).
6
Moreover, neither
gender nor ethnic group moderated the time trend (neither of the
interaction terms accounted for more than 0.1% of the variance
in either sample). Results were similar to those for narcissism in
that men self-enhanced more than women in both the college
sample (Ms50.27 vs. 0.14, d50.39) and the high school
sample (Ms50.19 vs. 0.18, d50.36) and that Caucasian
college students (M50.22) reported higher levels of self-en-
hancement than Asian college students (M50.24; d50.46).
However, in the high school sample, non-Caucasians (M50.12)
and Caucasians (M50.00) did not differ in self-enhancement
(d50.12).
DISCUSSION
The goal of this study was to investigate secular changes in
narcissism and self-enhancement using large samples of
northern Californian college students and a nationally repre-
sentative sample of high school students from the Monitoring the
Future study. California is regarded as the home of the self-es-
teem movement, so data from universities in this state are par-
ticularly useful given recent claims about the negative impact of
the culture of self-worth. Contrary to previous research and
media reports, this study yielded no evidence that levels of
narcissism have increased since Raskin and Terry (1988) first
published their 40-item forced-choice version of the NPI.
Likewise, we found no evidence that self-enhancement, defined
as inflated perceptions of intelligence, has increased over the
past 30 years. Thus, today’s youth seem to be no more narcis-
sistic and self-aggrandizing than previous generations.
Indeed, the means for the NPI from our sample closely re-
semble the means from a large Internet sample (Foster, Camp-
bell, & Twenge, 2003). In the latter sample, the average NPI
score for Americans ages 20 to 24 was 15.58 (N5775; J. Foster,
personal communication, April 5, 2007) and in our sample, the
mean NPI score for students ages 20 to 24 was 15.23 (N5
10,491). In addition, the mean reported by Foster et al. is very
close to the average of 15.55 reported by Raskin and Terry
(1988). Thus, both our data and the Internet data collected by
TABLE 1
Mean Full-Scale and Subscale Scores on the Narcissistic Personality Inventory (NPI) by Year of Data Collection
Year NFull NPI
Subscale
Authority Exhibitionism Superiority Entitlement Exploitiveness
Self-
Sufficiency Vanity
1982
a
1,018 0.39 (0.17) 0.52 (0.27) 0.32 (0.25) 0.51 (0.27) 0.28 (0.23) 0.29 (0.34) 0.35 (0.25) 0.46 (0.36)
1996 670 0.38 (0.17) 0.51 (0.29) 0.27 (0.27) 0.44 (0.28) 0.32 (0.25) 0.33 (0.27) 0.41 (0.25) 0.39 (0.35)
2002 3,117 0.37 (0.17) 0.49 (0.28) 0.27 (0.25) 0.41 (0.28) 0.30 (0.24) 0.31 (0.26) 0.41 (0.25) 0.37 (0.35)
2003 4,820 0.38 (0.17) 0.50 (0.29) 0.28 (0.25) 0.41 (0.28) 0.31 (0.24) 0.32 (0.27) 0.41 (0.24) 0.38 (0.35)
2004 4,770 0.38 (0.17) 0.50 (0.28) 0.28 (0.25) 0.40 (0.28) 0.32 (0.24) 0.32 (0.27) 0.41 (0.25) 0.39 (0.36)
2005 4,434 0.38 (0.17) 0.51 (0.29) 0.28 (0.25) 0.41 (0.28) 0.32 (0.24) 0.33 (0.27) 0.41 (0.24) 0.39 (0.35)
2006 4,974 0.38 (0.17) 0.50 (0.28) 0.28 (0.25) 0.42 (0.28) 0.32 (0.25) 0.32 (0.27) 0.41 (0.24) 0.39 (0.35)
2007 3,064 0.39 (0.18) 0.51 (0.28) 0.29 (0.26) 0.43 (0.28) 0.32 (0.24) 0.33 (0.27) 0.42 (0.24) 0.39 (0.35)
a— .84 .75 .65 .54 .48 .53 .42 .62
d
b
—0.06 0.07 0.16 0.36 0.17 0.10 0.24 0.20
(0.15 to 0.04) (0.17 to 0.02) (0.25 to 0.07) (0.45 to 0.26) (0.07 to 0.26) (0.02 to 0.20) (0.16 to 0.34) (0.29 to 0.11)
Note. For each year, standard deviations are given in parentheses.
a
The data in this row were obtained from Raskin and Terry (1988); means and standard deviations were converted from sums to scale means. The data were
collected from 1979 to 1985, so 1982 is the average year of data collection.
b
This row presents the standardized difference between the mean score in 1996
through 2007 and Raskin and Terry’s (1998) mean score for 1979 through 1985. A positive value indicates that the mean was higher in 1996 through 2007. The
numbers in parentheses are 95% confidence intervals.
6
Direct ratings of intelligence were uncorrelated with year (r5.02 and .02
for the college-student and Monitoring the Future samples, respectively).
184 Volume 19—Number 2
Secular Changes in Narcissism

Foster et al. fail to show a robust secular trend toward increases
in narcissism in young people over the past few decades.
Why do our findings differ from those of Twenge et al. (in
press)? First, our NPI results are based on large prescreening
samples, and our self-enhancement findings are based on a na-
tionally representative sample, whereas the findings of Twenge et
al. are meta-analytic results based on aggregated data from
comparatively small samples of college students (median N5
126, range 524–1,182). Aggregating means from small conve-
nience studies of college students might not be the best strategy
for making inferences about birth cohorts because students
choose to participate in studies on the basis of titles and de-
scriptions that might appeal to their individual characteristics,
including narcissism (e.g., Carnahan & McFarland, 2007). In
contrast, we used data from large mass testing sessions, which
makes our NPI samples considerably larger than those of most
individual studies of college students (our average annual sam-
ple size was 3,692) and makes the possibility of selection effects
less of a concern. Moreover, the Monitoring the Future results are
based on a representative sampling of high school students, a
sampling procedure that is particularly well suited for evaluating
claims about secular increases in self-enhancement.
Indeed, we believe that issues of sampling are paramount
when making generalizations about entire birth cohorts. Re-
searchers who are interested in making point estimates of par-
ticular attitudes often pay careful attention to sampling
procedures. Most college-student samples are generated using
nonprobability sampling techniques. As noted by Pedhazur and
Schmelkin (1991), ‘‘the incontrovertible fact is that, in non-
probability sampling, it is not possible to estimate sampling
errors. Therefore, validity of inferences to a population cannot
be ascertained’’ (p. 321). To be sure, pooling together conve-
nience samples of college students will never lead to estimates
that can be defended as representative of an entire population of
college students, let alone members of an entire birth cohort.
That is, no amount of aggregation will circumvent the limitations
of convenience sampling.
A second reason why our results differ from those of Twenge
et al. (in press) is that cross-temporal meta-analyses yield
ecological coefficients (Robinson, 1950), which are calculated
using summary statistics (e.g., sample means) rather than in-
dividual data points. As Rosenthal, Rosnow, and Rubin (2000)
noted, ‘‘correlations based on aggregated data (e.g., group
means) can be dramatically larger or smaller (even in the op-
posite direction) than correlations based on individual scores’’
(p. 2). We examined this issue by comparing the correlation
between year of data collection and self-enhancement based on
the full Monitoring the Future sample with the alerting corre-
lation based on the mean self-enhancement score for each year
(i.e., the data in Table 2). As reported in the Results section, the
correlation based on the full sample was .03; in contrast, the
alerting correlation was .57. Similarly, using the college-stu-
dent data from 1996 to 2007, we compared the individual-level
correlation between year of data collection and NPI score with
the altering correlation for the mean scores reported in Table 1.
The individual-level correlation was .01, whereas the alerting
correlation was .40; likewise, the individual-level correlations
ranged from .00 to .01 across Raskin and Terry’s (1988) NPI
subscales, whereas the alerting correlations ranged from .41
(Superiority) to .82 (Exhibitionism). These often dramatic
– 0.5
– 0.4
– 0.3
– 0.2
– 0.1
0
0.1
0.2
0.3
0.4
0.5
1982 1996 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007
Year of Data Collection
Standardized Narcissism Score
Fig. 1. Mean narcissism score (with 95% confidence interval) by year of data collection, stan-
dardized to Raskin and Terry’s (1998) mean.
Volume 19—Number 2 185
Kali H. Trzesniewski, M. Brent Donnellan, and Richard W. Robins

differences are consistent with the methodological literature,
which indicates that alerting correlations overestimate indi-
vidual effects in most behavioral research (Robinson, 1950;
Rosenthal et al., 2000). Thus, the cross-temporal meta-analytic
approach may amplify effects that are trivial from a psycho-
logical perspective.
A third issue to consider is that the NPI measures multiple
facets of narcissism (e.g., Emmons, 1987; Raskin & Terry,
1988), and temporal changes at the facet level may not always
map onto temporal changes in the full-scale score. Emmons
(1987) showed that subscales of the NPI can have distinct ex-
ternal correlates, some of which might be considered psycho-
logically adaptive (e.g., see Bradlee & Emmons, 1992).
Similarly, Konrath, Bushman, and Campbell (2006) reported
that the NPI Entitlement subscale is a better predictor of
laboratory-based measures of aggression than the full scale
is (see their footnote 1), which suggests that not all of the
narcissistic tendencies assessed by the NPI are equally de-
structive. The most important concern, however, is that
because the NPI assesses a number of constructs, it is unclear
how to precisely interpret any changes in the summary score. A
secular change in the NPI might signal changes in socially toxic
traits (e.g., entitlement), socially noxious traits (e.g., vanity), or
simply relatively benign traits (e.g., leadership). Our results
illustrate this point: The largest increase was found for the
seemingly benign trait of self-sufficiency, and the largest
decrease was found for the seemingly socially toxic trait of
superiority.
This study has several limitations. First, although we used
large samples of college students to evaluate secular changes
in narcissism, our large samples are not likely representative of
the entire U.S. population of 18- to 24-year-olds. Indeed, stu-
dents at 4-year colleges represent only 24% of the population
ages 18 to 24 (U.S. Census Bureau, 2005, Table A-5a). More-
over, it is unknown how students in psychology courses differ in
psychological characteristics from other college students.
Nonetheless, these two concerns are mitigated to some extent by
the fact that we also failed to find a secular trend in self-
enhancement in a representative sample of high school students.
Thus, we failed to find evidence of a secular trend in self-
enhancement using both representative and convenience
samples. Second, we did not have an ideal proxy measure for
intelligence to assess self-enhancement in the high school
sample. However, this concern is ameliorated by the fact that the
results were similar to those based on SATscores in the college-
student sample, which is not surprising because in the latter
sample, the correlation between self-enhancement based on
grades and self-enhancement based on test scores was .90. Thus,
the strengths and limitations of our data sets are quite comple-
mentary, and the results converge in showing few indications of
secular change in self-enhancement.
Finally, some of the findings we report are based on null re-
sults. However, null results can be critical in science when
they counter a predicted effect and when they are based on
large samples, which rules out concerns of a lack of power to
detect predicted effects. The lack of a clear trend toward
increasing narcissism directly addresses recent claims of
secular increases in narcissism that have received a great deal of
attention in the media, as shown by Jimmy Carter’s response in
Rolling Stone magazine. The degree of empirical support for
claims of increasing narcissism among this generation of
young American adults has important implications for how this
generation is viewed by others and how young adults view
themselves.
We believe that great care needs to be exercised when making
broad generalizations about cohort-related increases in narcis-
sism. We were unable to find evidence that either narcissism or
the closely related construct of self-enhancement has increased
TABLE 2
Mean Self-Enhancement by Year of Data Collection
Year NMean (SD)
1976 14,277 0.06 (0.95)
1977 15,638 0.03 (0.97)
1978 15,877 0.00 (0.96)
1979 14,141 0.01 (0.96)
1980 14,056 0.07 (0.99)
1981 15,611 0.06 (0.99)
1982 15,704 0.04 (0.99)
1983 14,514 0.03 (0.99)
1984 14,026 0.03 (1.00)
1985 14,096 0.03 (1.00)
1986 13,631 0.03 (1.01)
1987 14,390 0.07 (1.01)
1988 14,571 0.06 (1.03)
1989 14,785 0.03 (1.04)
1990 11,285 0.03 (1.03)
1991 13,462 0.04 (1.04)
1992 13,845 0.01 (1.06)
1993 13,913 0.01 (1.06)
1994 13,096 0.02 (1.08)
1995 10,647 0.02 (1.06)
1996 11,917 0.05 (1.07)
1997 12,728 0.00 (1.09)
1998 12,627 0.01 (1.09)
1999 11,347 0.01 (1.09)
2000 10,218 0.02 (1.10)
2001 10,390 0.06 (1.09)
2002 10,258 0.08 (1.09)
2003 11,718 0.10 (1.08)
2004 11,957 0.11 (1.07)
2005 11,966 0.08 (1.09)
2006 13,836 0.08 (1.08)
d
a
—0.06 (0.08 to 0.04)
a
This row presents the standardized difference between the mean for 2004
through 2006 and the mean for 1976 through 1978. The negative value indi-
cates that the latter mean was higher. The numbers in parentheses arethe 95%
confidence interval.
186 Volume 19—Number 2
Secular Changes in Narcissism

over the past three decades. Moreover, even if we had found
evidence for a secular increase in narcissism, placing the blame
on the self-esteem movement would seem to go well beyond the
data, especially when there is evidence that well-designed and
well-implemented self-esteem programs are effective interven-
tions for youth with certain problems (Haney & Durlak, 1998;
O’Mara et al., 2006). Our view is that the research findings
concerning generational differences should be based on well-
established results and presented to the public with a good
degree of caution given the inherent complexities involved in
studying cohort effects.
Acknowledgments—The first and second authors contributed
equally to this article; the ordering of authorship was arbitrary.
We thank Rob Ackerman, Kim Assad, Portia Dyrenforth,
Richard Lucas, and Ed Witt for helpful comments on an earlier
draft of this article.
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