In a recent review article published in Psychological Bulletin, researchers explored how narcissism changes throughout a person's life by combining data from various long-term studies.
They found that narcissism tends to decrease from childhood to old age but remains quite stable over time, implying that it is a consistent personality trait that significantly affects both individuals and the people around them.
Study: Development of Narcissism Across the Life Span: A Meta-Analytic Review of Longitudinal Studies. Image Credit: Elnur/Shutterstock.com
Dimensions of narcissism
For a long time, researchers have been curious about how narcissism develops through different stages of life. Questions include whether adolescents exhibit higher narcissism levels than other age groups and whether these tendencies decline as people age.
Another avenue of ongoing research is whether individual differences in narcissistic traits remain stable over time, meaning if someone is highly narcissistic at one stage in their life, will they remain so later on?
Despite this interest, there is no consensus on these issues, partly because few studies focus specifically on them. Additionally, earlier research has not differentiated between various dimensions of narcissistic personalities, leading to inconsistent findings.
An important recent development is a three-factor model of narcissism, which helps researchers understand key dimensions and differentiate between agentic, antagonistic, and neurotic narcissism.
Agentic narcissism involves a need for admiration and feelings of superiority. Antagonistic narcissism may include traits like arrogance and entitlement, while researchers characterize neurotic narcissism as emotional instability and sensitivity to criticism.
This model also allows researchers to distinguish between grandiose and vulnerable narcissism and their relationships with self-esteem.
By focusing on these three factors, researchers aim to get a clearer picture of how narcissism changes and remains stable throughout a person's life.
Understanding changes across an individual’s life
In this study, researchers aimed to understand how narcissism develops over a person's life and how stable it is over time. They focused on three types of narcissism: agentic (self-promoting), antagonistic (hostile), and neurotic (emotionally unstable).
To find relevant studies, they searched the American Psychological Association (APA) PsycInfo database and requested unpublished studies through scientific mailing lists.
This resulted in 745 potential studies. Studies that were in English or German, used a longitudinal design (repeated measures over at least 6 months), and assessed narcissism with self, informant, or observer reports using consistent methods were included.
The final sample comprised 51 research studies with 37,247 participants from various mostly Western countries and included different age groups and both clinical and nonclinical participants.
Two coders independently reviewed and coded the studies for details like sample size, country, gender, and age. They calculated effect sizes for mean-level change (how narcissism levels change on average) and rank-order stability (how individuals' levels compare over time), adjusting for measurement errors.
They used meta-analysis techniques with random-effects models to estimate overall trends and test whether factors like age, gender, and birth cohort influenced the results.
This rigorous approach helped ensure robust and generalizable findings about narcissism's development and stability across the lifespan.
Remarkable stabilities over the lifespan
Researchers found that narcissism generally decreases slightly each year. This decline was consistent across the three factors of narcissism: agentic, antagonistic, and neurotic. However, none of these changes were statistically significant. The rate of change did not differ significantly based on age, gender, or birth cohort.
Interestingly, clinical samples showed a larger decline in narcissism compared to nonclinical samples. This suggests that individuals in clinical settings might experience greater decreases in narcissism, possibly due to recovery or regression to the mean. In nonclinical samples, the yearly decline in narcissism was minimal.
Next, researchers analyzed data from multiple studies to investigate how stable narcissism is over time.
They used corrected test-retest correlations to measure stability and found that narcissism's stability ranged from 0.60 to 0.76, indicating moderate to high stability across different types of narcissism.
Age did not significantly affect the stability of narcissism, and neither did gender, birth cohort, or clinical status, except for a slight increase in stability in more recent generations for neurotic narcissism. However, the stability of narcissism decreased with longer time gaps between assessments.
When controlling for these time gaps, the results remained similar. They also found that narcissism's stability decreases exponentially over time, not linearly.
The long-term stability was highest for agentic narcissism, followed by antagonistic, and lowest for neurotic narcissism.
Conclusions
The study found that narcissism generally decreases from childhood to old age, with three types—agentic, antagonistic, and neurotic—showing different rates of decline. This supports theories suggesting that life experiences and social roles reduce narcissistic traits over time.
However, individual differences in these declines are not well understood. The study is limited by its focus on Western, predominantly White populations.
Future research should include more diverse groups, examine individual trajectories, and test different theories to explain these declines, such as the impact of social roles, emotional goals, and life experiences.
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