Implicit Measures of Agentic Narcissism and Their Relationships with Self-Enhancement.

Abstract

According to the Narcissistic Admiration and Rivalry Concept, the grandiose self-concept is regulated through two primary strategies: self-enhancement (agentic narcissism) and self-protection (antagonistic narcissism). These strategies can be assessed using the Narcissistic Admiration and Rivalry Questionnaire (NARQ), which showed adequate reliability and construct validity. However, like all self-report measures, the NARQ is vulnerable to self/other deception biases and introspective limits, rendering it not properly suited for capturing the automatic components of narcissistic self-concept. To address these limitations, both associative (Implicit Association Test; IAT) and propositional (Relational Responding Task; RRT) implicit measures were employed to assess agentic narcissism, and their reliability, convergent, concurrent, and incremental validity were tested across two studies. In Study 1 (N = 317), the Grandiosity IAT and RRT demonstrated adequate internal consistency, with the former showing higher α and ω coefficients. While convergent validity was low, the measures exhibited the expected correlation patterns with narcissism and self-esteem scales, supporting their concurrent validity (slightly stronger for the RRT). In study 2 (N = 222), the Implicit Propositional (but not the Associative) Agentic Narcissism showed a significant additive contribution in predicting self-enhancement over and above Explicit Agentic Narcissism, supporting the RRT (but not the IAT) incremental validity.