Narcissism and the use of personal pronouns revisited.

Abstract

[Correction Notice: An Erratum for this article was reported in Vol 109(3) of Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (see record 2015-37773-002). The authors erroneously reported the overall correlation, first stated in the abstract, between Narcissism and total first-person-singular use as .02 (.017) instead of .01 (.010). The misreporting of the overall correlation between Narcissism and total use of first-person singular does not change the results or interpretation in any way (i.e., the near-zero association between Narcissism and I-talk). The online version of this article has been corrected.] Among both laypersons and researchers, extensive use of first-person singular pronouns (i.e., I-talk) is considered a face-valid linguistic marker of narcissism. However, the assumed relation between narcissism and I-talk has yet to be subjected to a strong empirical test. Accordingly, we conducted a large-scale (N = 4,811), multisite (5 labs), multimeasure (5 narcissism measures) and dual-language (English and German) investigation to quantify how strongly narcissism is related to using more first-person singular pronouns across different theoretically relevant communication contexts (identity-related, personal, impersonal, private, public, and stream-of-consciousness tasks). Overall (r = .02, 95% CI [-.02, .04]) and within the sampled contexts, narcissism was unrelated to use of first-person singular pronouns (total, subjective, objective, and possessive). This consistent near-zero effect has important implications for making inferences about narcissism from pronoun use and prompts questions about why I-talk tends to be strongly perceived as an indicator of narcissism in the absence of an underlying actual association between the 2 variables. (PsycINFO Database Record

Do consumer choices augment narcissism? The role of self-referent processing

“…For example, the prominence of CEO's photographs in companies' annual reports is positively associated with CEO's narcissism levels (Chatterjee & Hambrick, 2007;Sedikides & Campbell, 2017). Also, some studies have reported a positive relation between first-pronoun use and narcissism (Chatterjee & Hambrick, 2007;Fast & Funder, 2010;Raskin & Shaw, 1988; but see Carey et al, 2015). Finally, other studies suggest that narcissists have lower self-control, which implies that they are unlikely to delay gratification, that they focus more on their immediate desires, and that they are impulsive or unconstrained by social norms (Miller et al, 2009;Rose, 2007;Vazire & Funder, 2006).…”

The Central Pronouns in Nigeria’s 2015 Presidential Debate: A Grammatical Analysis

“…Carey et al (2015), for example, investigate the extent to which narcissism is related to the use of the 1st person singular pronoun I and find no statistically significant correlation between I-talk and narcissism despite the large-scale sample employed. Kuo's (1999) analysis of personal pronouns in thirty-six scientific journal articles shows that the 1st person pronoun was used more frequently than others and that a number of semantic references perform multiple functions.…”

Affective Meaning of Pronouns in a Russian Sample

“…we are in search for the self as a part of personality in psychology. It is not surprising because a growing body of research suggests that language can be understood as the linguistic representation of the personality concepts (e.g., Carey et al, 2015;Fitzsimons & Kay, 2004;MA & LIU, 2016;Makarova, 2012;McGregor, 2010;Sučylaitė, 2012;XU, SUI, & AN, 2014). The language makes available for the description of personality features.…”

“…In particular, the I designates the subjective aspect and the me the objective aspect of the self (Thass-Thienemann, 1973). Similarly, Carey et al (2015) have emphasized use of first-person singular pronoun as subjective (I), objective (me), and possessive (mine). McGregor (2010) highlights use of first-person singular pronoun as I, me, my.…”