How Narcissism Shapes Responses to Antisocial and Prosocial Behavior: Hypo-Responsiveness

How Narcissism Shapes Responses to Antisocial and Prosocial Behavior: Hypo-Responsiveness or Hyper-Responsiveness? Jiafang Chen et al. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, April 15, 2021. https://doi.org/10.1177/01461672211007293

Abstract: Narcissists have a relatively higher proclivity for displaying antisocial rather than prosocial behaviors, suggesting a comparatively higher tendency for unfavorably impacting societies. However, maintenance of social order also depends on appropriate responses to others’ social behavior. Once we focus on narcissists as observers rather than actors, their impact on social functioning becomes less clear-cut. Theoretical arguments suggest that narcissists could be either hypo-responsive or hyper-responsive to others’ social behavior. Across four studies, we examined narcissists’ responsiveness to variations in others’ antisocial and prosocial behaviors. Results showed that narcissists differentiated less between others’ antisociality/prosociality, as reflected in their subsequent moral character evaluations (Studies 1–4) and reward and punishment (Studies 3 and 4). These results suggest that narcissists are hypo-responsive to others’ social behaviors. Implications and directions for future research are discussed.

Keywords: narcissism, social perception, responsiveness, moral character evaluation, reward/punishment

General Discussion

We examined how observers’ narcissism shapes their responsiveness to others’ social behavior. Across four studies, narcissists were consistently less responsive to variations in actors’ antisocial or prosocial behavior, providing evidence for a hypo-responsiveness rather than a hyper-responsiveness hypothesis. Specifically, narcissists differentiated less between others’ antisocial versus control behavior (Study 1), others’ prosocial versus control behavior (Study 2), and others’ antisocial versus prosocial tendencies (Studies 3 and 4), which was reflected in their subsequent moral character evaluations (Studies 1–4), and reward and punishment behavior (Studies 3 and 4).

Theoretical and Practical Implications

The present research has several theoretical implications. First, it extends prior research on narcissists’ responses to others’ behavior by switching from the perspective of a direct target or victim of (close) others’ behavior (Back et al., 2013; Bushman & Baumeister, 1998) to an indirect target or third-party observer perspective, examining responses to both antisocial and prosocial behaviors, and identifying downstream consequences of narcissists’ hyposensitivity mainly for moral character evaluations and also indirectly for reward and punishment. Therefore, our findings improve our understanding of narcissists’ dynamic self-regulatory processing in interpersonal situations (Morf & Rhodewalt, 2001) from more inclusive perspective.

Previous work has shown that, to maintain a positive self-concept in the agentic (vs. communal) domain (e.g., power, status; Grijalva & Zhang, 2016), narcissists are hyper-sensitive and vigilant to external cues related to status or power (Grapsas et al., 2020). Our findings on the mediation effects of recognized antisociality/prosociality complement this work by illuminating narcissists’ lower sensitivity to or recognition of communal information. Moreover, our exploratory results showing narcissists’ differentiation in perceived similarity to a successful/unsuccessful target (agentic information) provided further evidence for narcissists’ higher sensitivity to agentic than communal information (see detailed results in Supplemental Materials). Thus, it does not appear that narcissists are indiscriminately less sensitive to all contexts.

Alternatively, narcissists’ hypo-responsiveness could stem from their awareness of others’ underlying motivations for antisocial and prosocial behaviors. Both antisocial and prosocial behaviors can constitute a route to positive self-presentation (Flynn et al., 2006; Van Kleef et al., 2011), with antisocial behaviors being more commonly adopted by narcissists to gain status or attention (Adams et al., 2014). Although narcissism is unrelated to self-enhancement through prosocial behaviors (Nehrlich et al., 2019), narcissists sometimes present prosocial behaviors for selfish reasons, like gaining career experience (Brunell et al., 2014), or for praise and attention (Konrath et al., 2016). Thus, it is possible that narcissists are less responsive to others’ prosocial behaviors because they are aware of others’ potentially selfish motivations, and show greater tolerance for others’ antisocial behaviors which they themselves use to gain attention or status. Our exploratory results (see Supplemental Materials) showed that narcissists’ hypo-responsiveness on moral character evaluation was related to their lower self-reported antisociality/prosociality. One might posit that narcissists’ hypo-responsiveness resulted from them perceiving relatively lower (higher) similarity with the prosocial (antisocial) target. However, we found that narcissists showed no difference in perceived similarity with the two targets, which could be another manifestation of their insensitivity. Nonetheless, further examining the role of similarity in the scope of narcissists’ responses to others is a fruitful avenue for future research.

Interestingly, self-relevance was not found to play a role in affecting narcissists’ responsiveness in Study 1, with narcissists’ hypo-responsiveness being observed across both high and low self-relevance conditions. The fact that the antisocial actor pushed in at the front of the queue rather than immediately in front of participants might have rendered this behavior less psychologically proximate and less salient despite being relatively self-relevant, removing it from narcissists’ radar and reducing the need to allocate cognitive resources to encode this behavior (Wise et al., 2009). Consequently, such behavior may not have been perceived as a personal affront by narcissists (Lustman et al., 2010), reducing its perceived threat to their self-concept. Thus, this finding suggests that narcissists ignore threatening information that is not explicitly directed at them. Given that Back et al. (2013) did report that narcissists show revenge-related reactions when directly harmed by close others (i.e., friends), future research could examine the degree to which the anti- or prosocial behavior is directly aimed toward the narcissist while also considering the specific relationship between the narcissist and the protagonist.

Our findings that narcissists punished more overall regardless of their co-participant’s behavioral tendencies also contribute to research on narcissists’ unprovoked aggression (Park & Colvin, 2015; Reidy et al., 2010). Narcissists’ greater punishment of others might reflect their desire to assert their dominance vis-à-vis the other participant.

In terms of practical implications, our findings indicate that narcissists respond less discriminately on rewarding and punishing antisocial versus prosocial behaviors, which may over time lead to an increase in antisocial behaviors and a decrease in prosocial behaviors (Fehr & Fischbacher, 2004; Henrich et al., 2005). Such potential adverse influences may be particularly disconcerting when narcissists occupy influential positions. Recent research showed that narcissistic leaders sanctioned integrity-norm violators less and were associated with organizational cultures that devalued integrity (O’Reilly et al., 2018). Considering that narcissists have a higher chance of rising to powerful positions (Nevicka et al., 2011), organizations should introduce clear principles of conduct combined with incentives and penalties that are independent of leaders’ decisions to reduce the potentially detrimental impact of such leaders on organizations’ moral climate.

Strengths, Limitations, and Suggestions for Future Research

Our research has several strengths. We used different antisocial and prosocial behaviors and tendencies to demonstrate the generalizability of narcissists’ hypo-responsiveness to others’ social behavior and consistently found narcissists’ hypo-responsiveness in moral character evaluation. Furthermore, our findings show a similar effect for reward and punishment in Study 3, further lending some support for narcissists’ hypo-responsiveness. Finally, we illuminated underlying mechanisms by establishing recognition of others’ antisociality/prosociality as a mediator of narcissists’ moral character evaluations, reward, and punishment.

This research also has some limitations. Despite the validity and wide usage of the VDT (DeWall et al., 2013; Øverup et al., 2017), participants’ engagement in punishing may be affected by not seeing the consequences of their punishment behavior. Therefore, it would be helpful to enhance participants’ engagement in behavioral responses by adopting more direct punishment measures, such as noise blasts (Bushman & Baumeister, 1998). Moreover, because this was a one-shot study and there was little reason for participants to believe that the responses would affect their co-participant’s future behaviors, participants’ behavior toward their co-participant was unlikely to involve their conscious desire to regulate the co-participant’s future behavior. Future research could examine situations where punishment and reward behavior can be seen to have more observable impact on others over time.

While our research focused on im(morality) in the communal domain, future research could examine how narcissists, as third-party observers, respond to others’ (in)justices in the agentic domain that could harm or benefit someone else’s striving for status or power. For example, how would narcissists respond to seeing someone cheating in an examination, or seeing someone giving a classmate a leg up? Because narcissists’ higher feelings of power may allow them to better distinguish goal-relevant versus goal-irrelevant information (Guinote, 2007), they may categorize status- or power-related information as irrelevant if such information does not affect their own status or power. Therefore, they may be less responsive to such irrelevant information in spite of its status or power component. Thus, narcissists as a third party may likewise demonstrate hypo-responsiveness to others’ (in)justices in the agentic domain.