A Trifurcated Model of Narcissism: On the pivotal role of trait Antagonism

The “Why” and “How” of Narcissism: A Process Model of Narcissistic Status Pursuit

“…Early psychoanalytic writings profiled narcissists as agentic and antagonistic individuals: Regarding the former, they have been depicted as adept at leading, impressing, and demonstrating their superiority but, regarding the latter, they have been depicted as aggressive, confrontational, and arrogant (Freud, 1931(Freud, /1955Reich, 1933Reich, /1949. More recent theoretical perspectives have similarly highlighted narcissists' agentic and antagonistic interpersonal behaviors, which may result in the acquisition of a high status (Back et al, 2013;Campbell & Campbell, 2009;Campbell & Foster, 2007;Krizan & Herlache, 2018;Sedikides & Campbell, 2017;Weiss, Campbell, Lynam, & Miller, 2019). To explain the motivational roots of narcissistic behaviors, theoretical perspectives have underlined narcissists' craving for respect (Baumeister & Vohs, 2001) or need for admiration (Back et al, 2013;Morf & Rhodewalt, 2001) and thus indirectly hinted at a strong status motive.…”

Measurement of narcissism: From classical applications to modern approaches

“…Despite the fact that the NGS and the NVS were designed to measure grandiosity/agentic extraversion and vulnerability/neuroticism exclusively (Crowe et al, 2016(Crowe et al, , 2018, it seems that they also capture some elements of self-importance; however these elements different in nature between the NGS and the NVS. Weiss, Campbell, Lynam, and Miller (2019) argued that although antagonism is indeed the core trait of narcissism, which is in line with the NSM (Krizan & Herlache, 2018), its role is different across grandiose and vulnerable narcissism. More specifically, the antagonistic traits vary across them with more internalized expressions (e.g., anger) being more typical for vulnerable narcissism and more externalized expressions (e.g., aggression) being prototypical for grandiose narcissism (Weiss et al, 2019).…”

“…Weiss, Campbell, Lynam, and Miller (2019) argued that although antagonism is indeed the core trait of narcissism, which is in line with the NSM (Krizan & Herlache, 2018), its role is different across grandiose and vulnerable narcissism. More specifically, the antagonistic traits vary across them with more internalized expressions (e.g., anger) being more typical for vulnerable narcissism and more externalized expressions (e.g., aggression) being prototypical for grandiose narcissism (Weiss et al, 2019). The NGS correlates strongly with indicators of the entitlement dimension such as the Psychological Entitlement Scale (Campbell, Bonacci, Shelton, Exline, & Bushman, 2004), and also to a lesser extent with measures of vulnerable narcissism.…”

“…This distinction can be further linked to internalizing (vulnerability) and externalizing (grandiosity) pathology (Wright et al, 2012). Aggressiveness is the facet which is externalizing in nature, however in order to avoid floor effects Back et al (2013) asked for mild aggressive reactions and internal precursors of aggressive behaviors (e.g., I often get annoyed when I am criticized), which in fact represents an internalization (Weiss et al, 2019). Because the experts did not compare rivalry to the self-importance dimension (Miller et al, 2014), its high correlation to vulnerable narcissism might be biased, particularly as aggressiveness represents items that are internalizing in nature.…”

“…However, as personality pathology can be divided into internalizing and externalizing (Wright et al, 2012) so can antagonism (Weiss et al, 2019), although little is known about these dynamics and future research is needed. It is important to note that the single peripheral dimension of narcissism (i.e., vulnerability/neuroticism or grandiosity/agentic extraversion) refers neither to vulnerable or to grandiose narcissism, because it is the central dimension of self-importance/antagonism, which defines narcissism (Krizan, 2018;Miller et al, 2017;Weiss et al, 2019;. Thus, some of the existing one-dimensional measures might better capture some specific features of, for example, grandiosity/agentic extraversion (e.g., NPI, SD3) but they arguably lack satisfactory coverage of the antagonistic aspects of narcissism.…”