National narcissists are more willing to conspire against their fellow citizens

Feeling that your nation, religion, organisation, or political party is superior but under-appreciated is known as "collective narcissism". And now a team led by Mikey Biddlestone at the University of Cambridge reports that collective narcissists are more willing to conspire against other members of their own group. 

The team's paper, in the British Journal of Psychology, reports studies on people from Poland, the UK, and the US. In the first study, 361 Polish participants completed various questionnaires, including one that measured national narcissism using items such as "If Poles had a major say in the world the world would be a much better place". An additional measure of "National identification" tapped into a happier, more secure sense of national feeling — "I feel strong ties to other Polish people", for example. The participants also completed a brief scale that assessed whether, if they held a government position, they would be willing to wiretap fellow citizens, "spread false information if the situation required it", and perform Internet surveillance without the consent of the citizens being observed.

Once any overlap between the participants' national narcissism and national identification was accounted for in the analysis, those who'd scored highly for national narcissism were more likely to say they'd conspire against fellow citizens. In contrast, high national identification scores were linked to a lower willingness to conspire.

A subsequent study on 471 US-based participants incorporated even more extreme potential actions — such as a willingness to aid in the concealment of efforts that could lead to the spread of viruses, or even, "if necessary", to work with the government to carry out domestic acts of terrorism. People who scored higher in national narcissism were more willing to engage in these conspiracies — even though doing so could clearly harm fellow citizens.

In a later study, again on Polish participants, the team found that national narcissism predicted willingness to conspire against the in-group over and above other political and personality factors, such as scores for Machiavellianism or psychopathy. There was also another interesting finding from this study: those with high national narcissism scores were only willing to conspire against those they perceived to be typical, genuine members of their nation. "Collective narcissists might… view typical, yet disloyal in-group members as the most threatening to the in-group image, making them likely targets of conspiracies," the team writes.

The UK study looked not at national but workplace narcissism. These participants were asked about their willingness to collude in spreading false information about other members of their team at work, or conspire against them in various other ways, in a bid to gain an advantage over them. This time, however, there was no clear link between collective narcissism scores and a willingness to conspire against the in-group.

For the studies looking at national narcissism, though, the results were consistent. "While traditional accounts of in-group identity might suggest that people are willing to act against outgroups rather than in-groups, we show that this might not be true for certain forms of in-group identity," the researchers observe.

What might explain this? Collective narcissism is thought to compensate for frustrated individual needs, such as feelings of powerlessness. For these people, the group serves those needs — giving them an enhanced sense of power, for example. Acting against fellow members might further boost feelings of power.

It's also possible that collective narcissists are more willing to conspire against fellow group members because they project their own willingness to conspire on to them. Indeed, some of the data suggests that this is the case.

However, it's worth stressing that the links reported by the team are all correlational; there could be alternative or additional explanations. As the researchers point out, if collective narcissists are more likely to believe in conspiracy theories in general, this might fuel a culture of intra-group suspicion and paranoia, making in-group conspiracy narratives more believable. Also, only in one of the studies — on workplace teams — were the participants asked to think about people they actually knew personally. And of course this study did not find a clear link between collective narcissism and a willingness to conspire against the in-group. Perhaps this link manifests only when the group is so big that the individual has no personal connection with the people they would be targeting.

Overall, though, the work suggests that we should be wary of fellow group members who show signs of collective narcissism.

"Even though collective narcissists seem to always be on the lookout for others threatening their group, eventually they might end up being their own group's worst enemies," the team concludes.

Further reading

– Their own worst enemy? Collective narcissists are willing to conspire against their in-group

About the author

Emma Young (@EmmaELYoung) is a staff writer at BPS Research Digest