Culture and narcissism: The roles of fundamental social motives
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Cultures that value individuality over collective cohesion tend to report higher levels of narcissism. One plausible explanation is that individuals with vertical individualistic orientations might find it easier to justify motivations to procure individual status and success, which may reinforce narcissistic tendencies. We tested this idea with samples of university students (N1 = 545) and working adults (N2 = 534). Specifically, we examined the degree to which cultural orientations related to grandiose narcissism through the fundamental social motives of status and affiliation. The indirect effects of vertical individualism on narcissism exhibited consistent patterns in both samples. As expected, vertical individualism related to higher levels of both agentic and antagonistic narcissism via a stronger status motive. The indirect effects of horizontal collectivism on narcissism were only observed for narcissistic rivalry. Specifically, horizontal collectivism related to lower levels of antagonistic narcissism via a stronger affiliation motive and a weaker status motive. Through documenting the interconnectedness of individuals’ cultural orientations, social motives, and narcissism, our findings demonstrate the central role of the status motive for narcissism.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".