In the last decade the Narcissistic Admiration and Rivarly Concept (NARC) was developed, a model that assumes two possible strategies for the regulation of self-grandiosity (i.e., self-enhancement and antagonism). It is worth noting that narcissistic fantasies (e.g., over-estimation of the self and hyper-devaluation of the others) may be difficult to be captured using self-report scales, as they are prone to impression management, self-deception and introspective inability. In the past 30 years, several models of implicit social cognition were developed, along with a series of experimental paradigms designed to measure the spontaneous components of self vs. others evaluations. Of particular interest here is the Relational Responding Task (RRT), a new implicit measure designed to capture, not mere automatic association (like the Implicit Association Test), but actual psychological beliefs. The present project is aimed at applying the Relational Responding Task (RRT) to measure the different facets of narcissism as theorized in the NARC model. Two RRTs (Admiration and Rivarly) and two self-report measures of narcissism will be administered to a sample of university students (about 200 participants), along with a series of scales measuring related constructs (self-esteem, life satisfaction, optimism, pathological personality traits and impression management) and three different self-enhancement measures (Better than average, Over-claiming technique and Self-Perceived Intelligence). Subsequently, it will be investigated the internal consistency, the convergent validity (by examining the correlations between implicit and explicit measures of narcissism), the criterion validity (by examining the correlations of the RRTs with self-report scales of self-esteem, life satisfaction, pathological traits and impression management) and the incremental validity (by examining the unique contributions of the RRTs on self-enhancement indices) of the new implicit measures.
Regarding the innovativeness of the present project, three different points deserve to be mentioned.
First, the application of implicit measures to assess Admiration and Rivarly narcissistic dimensions represents one of the first attempts to evaluate in vivo spontaneous fantasies of self-grandiosity and of devaluation of the other that are typical of narcissistic individuals. As illustrated in dual models of social cognition, self-report scales are not suited to capture these spontaneous thoughts, as various factors, such as impression management, self-deception and introspective inability, may impair an adequate translations of implicit representations into an explicit format. It is worth noting that
this conception does not lead to the conclusion that self-report scales are less informative than implicit ones, rather explicit measures of narcissism better predict deliberative components of behavior (that is prone to factors such as impression management), while implicit measures better predict spontaneous components of conduct (less prone to factors such as impression management).
Secondly, in order to select the most adequate experimental paradigm to measure Admiration and Rivarly components of Narcissism, we decided to exclude cognitive tasks based on an associative conception of implicit cognition, like the Implicit Association Test (Nosek et al., 2007). As shown in different studies (e.g. Remue, De Houwer, Barnes-Holmes, Vanderhasselt., & De Raedt, 2013), the use of an associative technique such as IAT can lead to distortions in the evaluation of the construct to be measured, especially when the attribute of interest concerns self-related evaluations.
For Instance, Remue et al (2013) clarified that Self-Esteem IAT scores (aimed at detecting the association between "Self" vs. "Others" target categories and "Positive" vs. "Negative" attribute categories) tend to confound the perceived-Self (i.e., How I feel to be) with the ideal-Self (i.e., How I would like to be). In this view, a relevant innovation of the present study is the reference to a propositional model of implicit cognition (De Houwer et al., 2015), and the consequent use of a measure (i.e, the RRT) that is designed to assess implicit self-related beliefs, and not mere automatic associations.
Finally, according to NARC model assumptions, different studies showed that Admiration and Rivarly dimensions are differently related with a series of theoretically linked scales (i.e., self-esteem, personality traits exc.). In accordance with these results, we hypothesized that ADM-RRT and RIV-RRT will show different pattern of relations with self-esteem, life satisfaction, pathological personality traits as well as with self-enhancement indices. If these these expectations will be confirmed, innovative evidence will be found corroborating the bidimensional model of grandiosity (i.e., Admiration and Rivarly) theorized in the NARC model.
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