The over-sexed belligerence of Anthony Weiner, whose candidacy for mayor of New York failed this week, illustrates the classical view of narcissism as a complex personality trait involving lack of empathy, self-centred grandiosity and arrogance.
Universal Pictures CanadaCharlize Theron plays the narcissistic evil queen in "Snow White and the Huntsman."
From the horrific self-absorption of Karla Homolka and the evil Queen in Snow White, to the homicidal flamboyance of Muammar Ghaddafi and Kim Jong Il, the narcissist is usually described as the product of a long and complicated psychological development. Like hypochondriacs, narcissists are made, not born.
New research out of Wilfrid Laurier University, however, suggests narcissism might be simpler than that. More than just a moral failing or psychiatric symptom, narcissism might reflect a basic mechanical failure of the brain’s natural tendency to mimic.
Intriguingly, it also suggests that narcissism’s opposite, empathy, might even improve with practice.
At the heart of the project was mimicry, the tendency to inadvertently copy others in social situations, which is a human trait with two competing explanations. One is that it evolved as a means of social cohesion. The other, which lead author Sukhvinder Obhi prefers, is that it is learned individually on a much shorter time-frame.
Narcissists don’t imitate automatically
In an interview, Prof. Obhi described the process like this. Imagine picking up a coffee cup, an action that has motor aspects (what your brain does to make your hand move) and sensory aspects (what it looks like when your hand moves). Over time, these become linked through learning, such that when the sensory aspects are re-activated (for example, when you see someone else pick up a coffee cup), the motor aspects also re-activate.
This is known as the “mirror neuron” system. Discovered in the 1990s, it is thought to underlie many mysterious cognitive functions, from imitation and facial recognition to self-awareness, with possible relevance to autism.
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Co-author Christian Jordan said this mirroring function of the brain provides a kind of “scaffold” for empathy, by letting us appreciate what is going on in other people’s minds. To follow this metaphor, the narcissist’s moral scaffolding is shaky. His bridge to other people is in danger of collapse. Lacking empathy or understanding, the narcissist tends to take a “utilitarian” view of other people, Prof. Jordan said, and is more interested in others as means to their own personal ends, rather than as peers.
To investigate this, the psychologists devised a simple experiment, reported in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, with students Jeremy Hogeveen and Miranda Giacomin.
AFP/Getty ImagesA combination of file pictures shows former Libyan leader Muammar Ghaddafi in different outfits.
First, they had a group of student subjects take the Narcissistic Personality Inventory, a common test to gauge a person’s narcissism. All the subjects were “subclinical,” meaning they were not diagnosed with Narcissistic Personality Disorder, but were more or less normal.
Watching for cues on a screen, the subjects were told to raise their index finger if they saw the number 1, and their middle finger if they saw the number 2. The catch was that they were simultaneously shown a video of another person’s hand doing the same thing, sometimes correctly, sometimes not.
“What you find, as an indicator of motor resonance [a term for the action of mirror neurons], is that people show an interference effect when the cue and the visual image are incongruent, when they don’t match. So you’re cued to lift your index finger, but the hand on screen lifts its middle finger. People typically are slower and less accurate in making the response,” said Prof. Jordan.
As a general rule, they found that this “automatic imitation effect” is widely shared. People who were more narcissistic, however, showed much less interference.
“Their brain is simply not processing the other person’s action to the same extent, or if it is processing the other person’s action, there are additional mechanisms that they can deploy to suppress input from other people, which fits quite nicely with what we know of how narcissists deal with other people,” said Prof. Obhi. “It’s automatic, but the extent to which it manifests seems to change as a function of personality.”
Narcissists in real life often have trouble in social relationships
“Narcissists don’t imitate automatically,” he said. “It could be one of the reasons why narcissists in real life often do have trouble in social relationships.”
Future work is likely to focus on the possibility that narcissism can be lessened by training in empathy, based on this theory of mimicry. “We can train this,” Prof. Obhi said.
They also expect to find a stronger effect with more flagrant narcissists. Prof. Obhi joked that his department is full of them.
National Post
jbrean@nationalpost.com