Narcissism and conversational interaction: The influence of personality on discourse structure.

Abstract

As one means to explore the co-occurrence of vulnerability and grandiosity in narcissistic personality, this study was designed to test the theory of S. Bach (1985) that narcissists lack a normal ability to alternate between passive and active roles in interpersonal interaction. Informal conversation between peers was seen as an everyday activity suitable to experimental study in which differences in a subject's ability to occupy active and passive roles could be measured. Subjects, 166 undergraduate women at a large Midwestern university who participated for course credit, were paired into dyads and asked to converse for a 12-18 minute period. The resulting conversations were analyzed for linguistic differences according to personality as measured by the Wink-Gough Narcissism Scale and Goldberg's 100 Big-Five markers. Analyses upon language from individuals were restricted to those who reside in the Midwest to reduce linguistic variance due to region. Five subjects who scored in the top quartile on Narcissism, Neuroticism, and Extraversion used third-person plural pronouns in utterances with significantly greater frequency than other subjects. These differences persisted in analyses of ratios of third-person-plural to second- and first-person pronoun usage. Subjects who scored high on Narcissism and Neuroticism used words that express positive emotion in significantly fewer utterances than other Midwestern subjects. Extroversion and, in particular subjects' ratings of themselves as talkative, were predictive of differences in length of utterances and total number of words uttered in a ten-minute period. The use of measures of a complex personality constellation (Narcissism) and the Big-Five Factor proved helpful in predicting variations in language according to personality. These slight but measurable variations are both on the level of semantics and syntax. While support was found for the hypothesis that a sub-group of narcissistic personalities, perhaps with borderline traits, form a distinct group which tends toward a distanced and impersonal manner of speaking about others, no explicit support was found for an underlying narcissistic deficit in the ability to alternate between passive and active roles.