The Swiss studies would suggest that people high in narcissism are more likely to fail, but that failure doesn’t seem to penetrate to the core of their sense of self. Taking the approach that narcissism is a stable trait, the Orth and Luciano more or less ruled out the possibility that there could be fluctuations in narcissism that take place on a day-to-day level. Their approach didn’t make possible, then, a test of whether people high in narcissism showed a dip in this trait immediately after a failure until they were able to dig down into their self-aggrandizing resources. These resources could include blaming someone else for failure, minimizing the failure’s importance, and taking a derogatory approach to the winner.
2020-11-12