Psychologist W. Keith Campbell Breaks Down the Different Forms of Narcissism

Is there any evolutionary benefit to narcissism? Where does that come from? Does it exist in the animal kingdom? Yes. If you think about it from an evolutionary perspective, which some people have, narcissism seems to be really good for short-term mating success. If I go to a bar in downtown Austin and I give narcissism questionnaires to all the dudes there, the higher scores are going to get the most numbers over time. That's usually what happens. Narcissism is usually good for short-term mating and it's good for status seeking, power seeking. It's probably beneficial in those contexts. This is where it gets a little weird because in stable environments, like in research in hunter-gatherer societies, in stable environments if somebody's cheating on other people, they're people's wives or stealing stuff or steals extra food. People don't like that. They'll just kill them. They'll just go have a hunting accident. If you're the dick in the hunter-gatherer society, it'll take you out and you'll just won't come back because they just don't want you. Narcissism gets weeded out in those places, but when things get unstable and things are uncertain, people who are narcissistic can get a lot of resources and do really well. Sometimes they do well, which keeps it around. Obviously, in big societies, you can become powerful enough to hire henchmen and hire a PR agent and you can build your own status and do a lot more than you can in a hunter-gatherer group where everyone knows you. What is narcissism? You define it. What is your definition of narcissism? It gets a little more complicated. When we're talking like this, I'm talking about grandiose narcissism and that's a basic trend. There's more than one kind of narcissism. Yes. I'll step back. When we talk about narcissism in the psychological literature, we're talking about three different things that are related. The first of these is narcissistic personality. This is a trait, meaning that people go from a high level to a low level. It's not a clinical disorder. In this trait, when it's grandiose, we say grandiose narcissism. It's this combination of sense of entitlement and the sense of superiority, but also you get extroversion and drive and ambition. Call it agentic extroversion. Somebody who is driven and extroverted, but also a little bit self-centered and antagonistic and entitled. That combination of traits, kind of a prima donna or overconfident or cocky or whatever you want to call it, that's what we talk about is grandiose narcissism. That's just a normal trait. There's another form of narcissism which we don't talk about as much in the normal world, but that's vulnerable narcissism. These are the folks that think they're really important, think they should be getting a lot of attention, think they're the smartest people in the room, but no one really looks at them. No one pays attention to them. They get insecure. They get depressed. They're self-esteem drops. They think, why am I getting the attention I deserve? I'm kind of a legend. It's a legend in their own mind. I was just talking about this basement narcissist, living in their mom's basement, thinking how great they are and fantasizing about it. Those more vulnerable folks, you don't see at the bars as much because they're in the basement, but you see them clinically because they're depressed and they go see a clinician and say, help me out, I'm anxious. Those are the two normal forms of narcissism, their traits. Then there's this clinical form or psychiatric form called narcissistic personality disorder, NPD. That personality disorder form of narcissism is an extreme form of narcissism. You have a high level of it, like Trump or a lot of celebrities or academics. But also to make it a clinical disorder, you have to have that impairment we're talking about. It has to be clinically significant impairment. That's usually the narcissism is so bad, your marriage or your relationships are falling apart. Your work life could be falling apart. Sometimes you find narcissistic, really successful people in offices who are narcissists, but they destroy the office culture. They're just bad workers. You can destroy that. You can make really poor decisions because your ego is so big, you just over invest in something and it just doesn't work out for you. You start dysregulating your financial decisions so you can make those mistakes. The big ones are usually interpersonal. When you have that kind of impairment, it can be a disorder and then you get treated for it. The vulnerable personality disorder is fascinating. That's a fascinating one because you see a lot of them on social media in particular. You see people that feel like they should be getting more attention than they are and don't understand why and feel upset by that or shortchanged. Social media is such a strange beast because it gives everybody the chance to have a camera and have the audience of a billion people. I could go on there and get a billion audience, but I have to earn that. You have lots of people that go, look, I can have a billion people in my audience, but I don't have those people. Why aren't they there? Who's screwing me over and not giving me, where are my followers? Why are I getting followers? I saw a guy the other day talking about being shadow banned and he had a thousand friends. I'm like, are you sure? Are you sure you're shadow banned? Are you sure people are just not interested in what you're saying? Maybe you're just not that interesting. That's the weirdest thing to ever say. I'm being shadow banned. Do you have evidence of this? What is happening here? Well, you're kind of an outlaw. This is not saying that shadow banning is not real, but people are using that as an excuse for why they're not getting the attention that they deserve. I would be the next Joe Rogan if it weren't for those dastardly shadow banners taking me down, holding me back. They know that they can't silence me. If I got out there, I would change the world, but these guys are holding me back. You can see how that turns into a delusional system. If you get with more schizophrenia, where there's a whole world of people out there trying to hold me down. I want to get to that too. I wanted to ask you if schizophrenia, we might as well get to it right now. Is there a connection between schizophrenia and narcissism? Because many people who are schizophrenic have these grandiose ideas of who they are or who they should be or where they fit in that are these ridiculously distorted perceptions of reality. Yeah. So, grandiosity, you can see with narcissism, I have this fantasy about a great am, this illusion, but it's usually within the scope of reality. So, if I'm talking to somebody narcissistic, they're like, I'm a 10, I'm pretty awesome. You're like, not really, man. You're just not, you're okay, but maybe go back to the gym. But it's usually not crazy. I was working in a hospital with a woman who was a patient who said that she worked, she was the tooth fairy, and she worked for Reagan as the tooth fairy. I thought, well, that's a grandiose delusion. Someone wasn't president, but he was still helping her behind the scenes. That's a grandiose delusion, but you wouldn't call that narcissistic because she wasn't really, her personality wasn't really narcissistic. She was more schizophrenic in her presentation, kind of flat affect, a little bit strange, odd or unusual, anodontist of lack of feeling and stuff, but those weird delusions. So, you can have those grandiose delusions, but it's not quite the same as narcissism. It seems to be working a little differently. The other place you see them is mania with bipolar disorder. People get really manic, and they get these manic phases, and they're like, I'm going to do this, I'm going to build this, I'm going to take over this, my record's going to be the best. That mania can look like narcissism too. Those are probably more closely linked. The psychological disorders that we're aware of, the ones like narcissism, the ones like schizophrenia. Do we know what's happening in the mind that causes a distortion of reality? Is it ego protecting you from the truth? Is it a chemical imbalance? Is it a series of things that all coincide? When you have someone who's both a narcissist and possibly schizophrenic. With narcissism, it's very hard to detect anything that's clearly biological. This is true for all personality. People have been looking at this last five years pretty hard for biomarkers or neural structures. You don't really see them very clearly. You do with schizophrenia. There's some. What is it with schizophrenia? It's not my area, and I don't want it. Jamie, if I say anything wrong, just check me and call me out because I don't want to screw up anything. That's one-handed Google on Earth. Please do that. There's the old stuff about plaque in the brain and things like with Alzheimer's, you see some missing neural structure, but that's just out of my area. With personality, you generally don't see it in there. You just can't find it so far. When you look at genetics, you know it's in the genes, but there's no single genes. It's like a swarms of genes that we've been seeing. If your father is a narcissist, are you more or less likely to be a narcissist? More. More. What have you learned from your father? My God, my father's ruin is like many alcoholics have children that won't touch liquor. I've known quite a few of them. In the clinical literature, they talk about that as sort of that identify with them or you do the opposite of the father. Say if you're the alcoholic father, like you said, you become a titular or your father's a narcissist, you become really nice. We don't really see that. What you tend to see, I mean, I was saying it doesn't happen because I know it happens, but what you tend to see in the literature with these big family studies is that traits like narcissism and all personality and really all mental disorders, they tend to follow family lines so they're heritable, but it's not really clear how that happens. Whether it's nurture or nature. Right. I mean, it's in there, but we don't know exactly what the genes are. When they start to look at the nurture question with a lot of personality, what you find is about ... When they break these down into heredity coefficients, they don't mean exactly what they sound, but generally you find it's about 50, 60% heritable, you're born with it, probably genetic, and maybe 10% is parenting, and maybe the other 30, 40% is something in the environment that's just not really clear what it is. The environment, really? Yeah, just random environment. That's why you have kids and I have two daughters. They're very different people. Part of that's genetics, obviously. They're very different. It's also their environment. I might have been a similar parent to both of them, but they have different friends. They grew up in a little different time, a little different culture, and all those forces affect you in ways you don't really understand. A lot of what happens to us is this non-shared environment we just can't really explain. Parenting is pretty small. Really? Yeah, it's weird. What we say about parenting is that it really doesn't make much of a difference, but it matters. I have two daughters, and the idea that I could change them one into the other through my parenting skills. I could take my one daughter who loves to dance and I could turn her into the one that loves math, and I could take the math one and turn her into it. No, I couldn't do that in a million years. They're just different people. No way. I can't really shape my kid's personality very well. Parents just can't really do that, but you matter a lot. You put food on the table, you're in a safe environment, you're not threatening the kids. There's a lot you do as a parent that matters, but you can't really fine tune your kid's personalities very well. Episodes of the Joe Rogan Experience are now free on Spotify. That's right. They're free from September 1st to December 1st. They're going to be available everywhere, but after December 1st, they will only be available on Spotify, but they will be free. That includes the video. The video will also be there. It'll also be free. That's all we're asking. Just go download Spotify. Much love. Bye bye.