Addiction of Being Powerful vs. Popular: Characteristics of Communal Narcissism

Abstract

This study focused on the characteristics of communal narcissism and the difference between agentic narcissism and communal narcissism. Gebauer, Sedikides, Verplanken, and Maio(2012) proposed the new and broad model of narcissism, agency-communion model of narcissism and developed the Communal Narcissism Inventory(CNI). Total of 228 undergraduate students(male=107, female=121) with the mean age of 21.5(SD=3.25) from Seoul National University participated in study 1, where power motive, affiliation motive, empathy(perspective taking, empathic concern), anger(state anger, trait anger, anger control, anger expression), aggression, and interpersonal problems variables were used to compare the difference between agentic narcissism and communal narcissism. Correlation of .399(p<.01) was found between agentic narcissism and communal narcissism. Also it was found that the more communal narcissistic the person is, the lower power motive, anger, aggression and interpersonal problem experiences in control dimension they possessed compared with agentic narcissistic people. Based on the result of study 1 that communal narcissisists and agentic narcissisists can have different reactions in negative emotions and social situations and previous studies that narcissists tend to be more aggressive in ego-threatening situations(e.g., Bushman & Baumeister, 1998

Bushman , Bonacci, van Dijk, & Baumeister, 2003

Donnellan et al., 2005

Stucke & Sporer, 2002

Twnege & Campbell, 203), in study 2, two types of ego-threatening scenarios were tested with 204 undergraduate subjects(male=90, female=114) from Seoul National University through both in offline and online survey. The participants completed four agency-threatening situations and four communion-threatening situation scenarios with hypothetical negative emotions, self-esteem, and life satisfaction in each case. Three different groups depending on their level of agentic narcissism and communal narcissism including one of control group were selected and analysis of variance were used for the analysis. As a result for emotions, unlike the hypothesis that anger would be salient in each corresponding situations, irritation in agency-threatening situations and shame in communion-threatening situations were significantly observed. Moreover, anger, irritation, shame, and depression were also found in some of the cases when looked into each scenario. Significant group differences were all found both in self-esteem and life satisfaction. Lastly, suggestions and implications for the future investigations are discussed.