Tag: Social Psychology

Posted on

What Everybody Ought To Know About Narcissism

What Everybody Ought To Know About Narcissism

What Everybody Ought To Know About Narcissism

Narcissism increased just as fast as obesity over the past 25 years, and a study today shows that it is twice that rate since 2002.”

– Psychologist Dr. Jean Twenge, author of The Narcissism Epidemic: Living in the Age of Entitlement

What Is Narcissism?

The main characteristic of narcissism is self-centeredness.

Narcissism is an inflated sense of self. It is thinking that you are better than you actually are. It is a complicated trait with lots of different correlates to it, but it does include things like seeking fame, attention, vanity, and so on. However, its main characteristic is its self-centeredness.

Narcissism at base is all about trying to get more: more attention, more things, to look more beautiful – it’s always ‘more’ in these rather shallow ways.”

What Is The Difference Between Self Esteem And Narcissism?

Narcissists do not consider caring for others and relationships as being important.

One of the key differences between self esteem and narcissism is that somebody who scores high” (in this psychological examination) “for self esteem but not for narcissism, has a lot of confidence in individual areas but also cares a lot about relationships. Narcissists tend to be missing that piece about caring for others and relationships.”

Signs Of Narcissism

  • Overconfidence
  • Being delusion about one’s own greatness
  • Over-optimism
  • Taking too many risks
  • An inflated, unrealistic sense of self
  • Alienation from other people
  • Entitlement, the expectation of having things handed to you without much effort
  • Not caring about others.”

Dr. Jean Twenge Talks About The Narcissism Epidemic

Causes Of Narcissism

Narcissism As An Inborn Personality Trait

Narcissism is a personality trait, so it has the same determinants as any personality trait. Other personality traits include things like being highly anxious or being outgoing, and a good amount of it comes from being born with those tendencies.”

 

Narcissism As A Result Of Social & Environmental Influence

The culture you grow up in, parenting and other parts of the environment, play a strong role in determining how narcissistic someone is.”

Narcissism In Culture – The Social Influence Of Narcissism

Parenting

No parent ever says ‘my goal is to raise a narcissistic kid.’ It’s part of this overall individualistic culture. It comes from the ‘good intentions’ of trying to develop self esteem, from the cultural pressures of uniqueness and standing out.

Emphasizing specialness, uniqueness and standing out so much does tend to create that situation where we’re focusing on that, we’re focusing on being better [than others] and standing out.”

 

Celebrity & Reality TV Culture

Over the top reality shows, such as the popular My Super Sweet 16 – rich kids planning their birthday party, who complain if they get the $50,000 car instead of the $100,000 car – have made narcissism seem normal.

A lot of this obsession with celebrities, and of course, a lot of being a celebrity is highly narcissistic in terms of vanity and seeking fame and attention.

A study published in Academic Journal showed that celebrities are more narcissistic. Drew Pinsky had 200 celebrities fill out the narcissistic personality inventory when they came onto his show, and he found that they were more narcissistic than his control group.

He also broke it down: Who were the most narcissistic celebrities? Was it musicians, movie stars, stand-up comedians? No, it was the reality TV stars.

What’s interesting about that is that these shows are supposed to be a slice of real life, and those are the shows that are very popular right now, especially among young people, but what they really are is a showcase for narcissistic behaviors.

Reality TV has taken it to the next level of showing that this is how people really behave, that people always have plastic surgery, and always get into fights with people who are supposed to be their friends, and act badly, and are obsessed with fame.

On the Web and on reality TV, the way to get the most attention, and thus to make the most money, is to be as provocative as possible. So it really pulls for that narcissistic behavior.

It is this culture that seems to encourage this attention seeking, and also encourages that not just fame, but also infamy, is just as good.”

 

Relationships/Friendships

If you’ve grown up your whole life and everything is about you then of course it’s a lot more difficult to compromise in a relationship… if you never compromise you’re not going to be married very long, among other things. Even in a friendship the same is true. You really have to make it not about you all the time.

Narcissists are horrible relationship partners in the long run. It’s really important in a relationship to have two people who are both focused on caring for the other, and not just focused on themselves.”

 

Narcissism Contributing To The Credit Crisis

Easy credit allows people to look better off than they actually are. For a narcissist, this is great. And even for somebody who isn’t particularly narcissistic, but who got sucked into this narcissistic culture of over-purchasing with intent to pay it off through credit.

One of the key outcomes of narcissism is over-confidence, which explains a lot of how we got into the” credit crisis, recession and bad mortgages “in the first place. Home buyers would think ‘I’d be able to pay for that.’ Bankers as well, not only home owners, would tell them: ‘Housing never goes down! I’m sure everything will be fine with these mortgage backed securities.’ That’s the huge downside of overconfidence, in that reality always wins in the end. This is one of the reasons why we ended up with the recession.”

Dealing With Narcissism

Remind About How Much We Have In Common As Human Beings

The key to solving some of this is reminding kids, and adults for that matter, just how much we have in common as human beings.”

– All above quotes by Dr. Jean Twenge

 

Connection With Others Holds Self Centeredness In Check

Make people feel connected and that buffers a lot of bad behaviors.

If you have compassion for others, if you feel connected to others, you’re not going to have that really toxic level of narcissism.

Communities inherently place checks on people and reign in some of that self centeredness. So the more we can have those connections with others, and that’s on a societal and community level as well as a personal level, that tends to really hold that self centeredness in check.”

– Dr. W. Keith Campbell

 

Dr. W. Keith Campbell Discusses Connection As A Means Of Dealing With Narcissism

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cYGmu6NYXQo

More About Narcissism With Dr. Jean Twenge & Dr. W. Keith Campbell

Image: Modified version of Narcissism by videocrab. ©

Posted on

Social Scientist Philip Zimbardo: Factors Other Than Character Determine Behavior [TED Talk]

As a child growing up in a tough neighborhood in the South Bronx (an inner city ghetto of New York), social psychologist Philip Zimbardo learned at an early age that

the line between good and evil (which privileged people like to think is fixed and impermeable – with them on the good side and others on the bad side); I knew that line was movable and permeable.”

In this TED video [23 minutes] Zimbardo presents three factors which can determine the likelihood of evil acts from healthy, normal well-intentioned people:

Bad Apples, A Bad Barrel Or Bad Barrel-Makers?

The 3 factors influencing the transformation of human character towards evil can be summarized as:

• Dispositional: Inside the person. This is the factor most often considered by culture, religions and government as the cause of behavior.

• Situational: Outside the person. This is the factor pointing to the influence of a person’s immediate surroundings, typically one in which a person’s normal, habitual behavior is not possible.

• Systemic: The power structure that creates and sustains the situation.

Since the inquisition we’ve been dealing with problems at the level of the individual and it doesn’t work.”

He recommends a paradigm shift of focus

away from the medical model which focuses only on the individual, towards a public health model that recognizes situational and systemic vectors of disease.”

 

Promoting Heroism As The Antidote To Evil

Zimbardo suggests the following:

• Promote the heroic imagination of kids in our educational system.

We want kids to think, ‘I’m a hero in waiting,’ waiting for the right situation to come along to act heroically.”

• Motivate people to overcome the natural tendency towards passive inaction in social situations [as demonstrated in the Bystander Experiment].

• Teach children to think and act socio-centricly, rather than ego-centricly.

• Unlike childhood heroes such as Superman and Wonder Woman who have special powers, children need to be told that heroes can come from everyday people.

Source: Zimbardo quotes, cartoon and video from YouTube/Philip Zimbardo: Why Ordinary People… 

Source: Popeye word cloud courtesy Terry McCombs

Posted on

Stanford Prison Experiment Shows How The Abuses At Abu Ghraib Could Be Perpetrated By Otherwise Good People

Dr. Philip Zimbardo, Professor Emeritus of Psychology at Stanford University, and who once conducted the now famous Stanford Prison Experiment, recently related the results of that 1971 experiment to the abuse discovered at Abu Ghraib. He said,

When the images of the abuse and torture in Abu Ghraib were revealed, immediately the military went on the defensive saying it’s a few bad apples. When we see people do bad things we assume they are bad people to begin with. But what we know in our study is: there are a set of social psychological variables that can make ordinary people do things they could never have imagined doing.”

The Stanford Prison Experiment was conducted over a six day period in a mock prison environment in the basement of one of the buildings at Stanford University. It demonstrated how ordinary people can perpetrate extraordinary abuses when placed in a cruel environment without clear rules, as shown in this short documenatry [13 min].

What Happens When You Put Good People In Evil Places?

Dr. Craig Haney, a social psychologist participating in the Stanford experiment said of it, 

We frankly didn’t anticipate what was going to happen. We tried to really test the power of the environment to change and transform otherwise normal people. Much as Milgram had changed or transformed otherwise normal people in an obedient situation, we wanted to do it in a prison-like situation.”

Experiment Participant Relates To The Guards At Abu Ghraib

Dave Eshelman, who played the role of a prison guard in the Stanford University mock prison experiment, said of the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse photos, 

What I first saw those photos, immediately a sense of familiarity struck me because I knew I had been there before. I’d been in this type of situation. I knew what was going on – in my mind.”

Source of images, video and quotes:  Youtube/The Stanford Prison Experiment

Posted on

The Asch Experiment: Can Social Influence Distort Your Perception?

We will conform to the group. We’re very social creatures. We’re very much aware of what people around us think. We want to be liked. We don’t want to be seen to rock the boat so we will go along with the group even if we don’t believe what people are saying, we still go along.” *

This is a conclusion from what is known as “The Asch Experiment,” an experiment originally conceived in the 1950’s by Social Psychologist Solomon Asch, demonstrated in the video below [2 min.]:

The 3 Levels of Distortion

As indicated in Martin Shepard’s video about conformity  [10 min.], “Asch proposed conformity could be explained by distortions occurring at any of three levels: perception, judgment and action.”

  • At the action level: subjects believe the majority are wrong, but go along with them anyway.
  • At the level of judgment: subjects perceive there is a conflict but reject their own judgment, concluding the majority are right.
  • At the level of perception: subjects’ perceptions are genuinely distorted by the majority’s answers”.
  • “If it’s true that the subjects’ perceptions are genuinely distorted, that means that group opinion has the potential to affect an individual’s information processing on a very profound level.” **

* Source: YouTube/The Asch Experiment

** Source: YouTube/Conformity 

Posted on

The Bystander Effect: Old Experiments Still Relative To Today’s Social Influences

And there you have a group of (effectively) strangers who were exerting the pressure not to intervene, not to help; and it’s very difficult to rebel!”

This Bystander Effect is demonstrated in the following video [3 min.]:

Using Other People’s Behavior As Clues To Reality

There are, in fact, many reasons why bystanders in groups fail to act in emergency situations, but social psychologists have focused most of their attention on two major factors. According to a basic principle of social influence, bystanders monitor the reactions of other people in an emergency situation to see if others think that it is necessary to intervene. Each person uses others’ behavior as clues to reality. Since everyone is doing exactly the same thing (nothing), they all conclude from the inaction of others that help is not needed. This is an example of pluralistic ignorance or social proof.

The other major obstacle to intervention is known as diffusion of responsibility. This occurs when observers all assume that someone else is going to intervene and so each individual feels less responsible and refrains from doing anything.”

Bystander Effect Extends To Cyberspace

The bystander effect also extends beyond reality and into cyberspace. Specifically, in a study performed by Markey (2000), the experiment focused on the amount of time it took a bystander to provide assistance. The researchers examined the effects of the gender of an individual seeking help by measuring participant response time (dependent variable). The perceived gender was manipulated by the usage of a male or female screen name in an Internet chat room (independent variable). The treatment conditions examined the number of people present in the chat (two to nineteen), and then asked the stimulus question: ‘Can anyone tell me how to look at someone’s profile?’

The findings reflect a correlation between the number of people present in a computer-mediated chat group and the amount of time it took for an individual to receive help. The higher the number of participants, the longer it took for someone to help. This research reveals that bystander interventions in Internet chat groups reflect the same patterns as interaction in non-computer based environments.”

The Bystander Effect was first demonstrated in the laboratory by John Darley and Bibb Latane in 1968. These researchers launched a series of experiments that resulted in one of the strongest and most replicable effects in social psychology.” 

1st quote source: YouTube Video: Bystander Effect
2nd & last quote source: Wikipedia/Bystander Effect
Other quote sources: http://www.psychwiki.com/wiki/Bystander_Effect