Testing the relationships between narcissism, risk attitude, and income with data from a representative German sample

Johannes Leder,Sarah Schneider,Astrid Schütz

doi:10.5964/ps.7293

Abstract

Narcissism is related to income and risk-taking behavior, but previous studies have computed only pairwise associations and have used only domain-specific risk-taking measures. We jointly investigated narcissistic admiration and rivalry, income, and general risk attitude. Using a representative sample from the German population (N = 14,473), we contrasted a model assuming that risk attitude and narcissistic admiration and rivalry share variance when predicting income and a model with additive effects of narcissism and risk attitude. We found stronger effects of admiration on risk attitude and income than of rivalry and no evidence that risk attitude and narcissism share variance when predicting income. Contrary to previous studies, we found that an individual's income was independent of their risk attitude. In exploratory analyses (Response Surface Analysis, Level-and-Difference-Approach), we found that the relative strength of admiration compared with rivalry positively predicted risk attitude and income. Taken together, our findings are consistent with the hierarchical model of grandiose narcissism.

Highlights

We propose that the admiration and rivalry dimensions of grandiose narcissism as suggested by the Narcissistic Admiration and Rivalry Concept (NARC) (Back et al, 2013) have distinct associations with risk attitude and income
If we find that an individual's risk attitude explains the variance shared between admiration, rivalry, and income, this could imply that a person who feels the need to be outstanding shows a higher willingness to take risks, which in turn is associated with a higher income
To test whether risk attitude and the dimensions of narcissism had incremental predictive validity over the covariates when predicting income, we used our fitted model with the 2018 data to predict income in 2019

Summary

Methods

We used data from the 2018 wave of the German SOEP, which was the first large-scale assessment of narcissistic rivalry and admiration in a representative sample. Reviewers pointed out that the data used in the present study did not allow us to test causal hypotheses, which was not our intention, but to avoid language that would suggest this, we dropped the mediation analyses and changed the hypotheses so that they ask about the extents to which risk attitude and the dimensions of narcissism share variance in their relationships with income. We excluded participants whose incomes represented outliers or seemed implausible. Conse quently, participants with a monthly gross income of over 10,746€ were excluded from the analyses (1.51%). We ran the regression models with the outliers, and the results did not differ (see Tables S2-S7 in Supplementary Materials, Supplement E)

Results

Discussion

Conclusion