The Narcissism Epidemic Is Dead; Long Live the Narcissism Epidemic
Abstract
Are recent cohorts of college students more narcissistic than their predecessors? To address debates about the so-called “narcissism epidemic,” we used data from three cohorts of students (1990s: N = 1,166; 2000s: N = 33,647; 2010s: N = 25,412) to test whether narcissism levels (overall and specific facets) have increased across generations. We also tested whether our measure, the Narcissistic Personality Inventory (NPI), showed measurement equivalence across the three cohorts, a critical analysis that had been overlooked in prior research. We found that several NPI items were not equivalent across cohorts. Models accounting for nonequivalence of these items indicated a small decline in overall narcissism levels from the 1990s to the 2010s (d = −0.27). At the facet level, leadership (d = −0.20), vanity (d = −0.16), and entitlement (d = −0.28) all showed decreases. Our results contradict the claim that recent cohorts of college students are more narcissistic than earlier generations of college students.
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All data have been made publicly available via the Open Science Framework and can be accessed at https://osf.io/t3csz/. The analysis plan for the study was preregistered at https://osf.io/8chxd/. The complete Open Practices Disclosure for this article can be found at Supplementary Material. This article has received the badges for Open Data and Preregistration. More information about the Open Practices badges can be found at http://www.psychologicalscience.org/publications/badges.
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