Level-1 Visual Perspective Taking Performance in People with High Narcissistic Traits

Abstract

Background: Lack of empathy is one of the main characteristics of narcissists. However, it is not clear whether there is a similar deficit in other facets of mentalizing, such as perspective-taking.Method: In this study, we measured the taking visual perspectives ascribed to different targets (e.g., first-person self, third-person self-avatar, and third-person stranger avatar). Our study focused on separate groups of individuals with high and low self-reported narcissistic traits. Results: Participants reporting high Narcissism scores showed higher accuracy in a third-person perspective-taking task than did their low-Narcissism counterparts. However, when the first-person perspective was incongruent with the third-person (first person vs. self- tagged avatar), the accuracy of their responses decreased.Conclusions: The discrepancy between the two types of perspective taking of people with high narcissism can probably mean that the narcissistic people perfectly identify / empathize with one object (person, avatar, character, etc.) and therefore their perspective-taking is disrupted when they need to identify with more than one object that represent their self-attributed perspectives.

Narcissists are not more egocentric: evidence from a performance-based perspective-taking measure

“…Given the counter-intuitive direction of the association, we conducted a second study which replicated that negative association on a larger sample. Further, a recent preprint study (Ebrahimian et al, 2021) reported a similar result with a similar visual perspectivetaking task: narcissists were better to judge from a 3 rd person perspective and were better when the third person character was tagged as another person (versus themselves). This set of findings strongly support the hypothesis that narcissists are actually not more egocentric but less egocentric.…”