Collective Narcissism: Americans Exaggerate the Role of Their Home State in Appraising U.S. History

Collective Narcissism: Americans Exaggerate the Role of Their Home State in Appraising U.S. History. Adam L. Putnam et al. Psychological Science, https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797618772504

Abstract: Collective narcissism—a phenomenon in which individuals show excessively high regard for their own group—is ubiquitous in studies of small groups. We examined how Americans from the 50 U.S. states (N = 2,898) remembered U.S. history by asking them, “In terms of percentage, what do you think was your home state’s contribution to the history of the United States?” The mean state estimates ranged from 9% (Iowa) to 41% (Virginia), with the total contribution for all states equaling 907%, indicating strong collective narcissism. In comparison, ratings provided by nonresidents for states were much lower (but still high). Surprisingly, asking people questions about U.S. history before they made their judgment did not lower estimates. We argue that this ethnocentric bias is due to ego protection, selective memory retrieval processes involving the availability heuristic, and poor statistical reasoning. This study shows that biases that influence individual remembering also influence collective remembering.

Keywords: collective memory, availability bias, egocentrism, narcissism, judgment, open data, open materials, and preregistered