Prof. Chris French
speaker
118 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard Apr 2025
Prof. Chris French’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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And so they concluded we are in a narcissism epidemic. Gene Twenge published a book called Generation Me, and all of this just blew up. It became huge. There was a ton of media attention on this.
Hustling her way up the narcissism spectrum.
Well, okay. What you just said is exactly what this other academic I spoke to felt like at the time, too. Her name is Kali Treznefsky. She's another psychologist. She's currently a professor at the University of California, Davis. Mm-hmm. So when she first saw this paper back when it came out, it made her really uneasy for a lot of the reasons you just said.
This idea of, you know, everybody is increasing in narcissism and like this generation is just going to end up in an awful place because they can't take criticism and they're all just full of themselves, out for themselves and don't care about anyone else. Those are quite strong statements to be making that leads to these stereotypes like, oh, yeah, there you are. There's that lazy youth again.
So Kali, I mean, at this time, she, because she was, you know, a little skeptical, but, you know, also just like, if this is true, we need good, we need a lot of data behind it because we are so prone to this confirmation bias where we think the younger generation sucks. So she found this other data set. It's called Monitoring the Future. And they survey high school seniors every year.
They've been doing it since the mid-70s. It's not the NPI, but they do ask questions about things like, how do you see yourself compared to others? How satisfied are you with yourself? How competent are you? So questions that could be related to an inflated ego.
So she and her co-author looked at students' answers to those questions between 1976 and 2006.
They saw no narcissism epidemic. Yeah, so we found that most things didn't change.
Yeah, the high school seniors in 1976 were just as likely to say, like, I'm not that special or I'm kind of special as the high school seniors in 2006. Oh. So she didn't find any evidence in this data of kids really changing.
And so basically ever since, there's been back and forth in the literature about what was actually going on over this time period. Yeah. Fast forwarding, what's really interesting is... is about what's happening today. Scientists have kept doing these analyses since this. Yeah. You know, that data was up to 2006. It's 2024. Yeah.
And so we do have newer studies where they've done something similar looking at newer crops of college kids. Right. And actually, what they're seeing now is that narcissism has been going down.
Even Keith, who was on Team Narcissism Epidemic, remember? Yeah. He was like, yeah, it's going down. At least what the NPI can measure, that grandiose narcissism.
So the debate here, I mean, it's funny. At this point, lots of scientists seem to agree. And it's not just Kali. It's not just Keith. But also there's another group from the University of Vienna. They just put out this big meta-analysis. All these different researchers in this space agree that there is currently no evidence that narcissism is up compared to a few decades ago. Hmm.
If there's a controversy, it's whether there was a bump for a while.
Well, it's hard to say because not everybody agrees that there was this bump. That's still controversial. And Keith now says, like, look, at this point, it's an archaeological question because it's over.
But so far what we've been talking about is this test that nerds use to measure, you know, kind of normal levels of narcissism. We haven't been talking about pathological narcissism, which is what Leigh has. Right. And people with this can be really self-centered, hurtful, manipulative.
So after the break, we are going to turn back to that darker type of narcissism to talk about what's going on in their heads. And if you've got someone like this in your life, How can you deal with them? Ooh, coming up.
Yeah, so we're moving to this pathological narcissism that goes way beyond us just kind of being our most arrogant selves. And I talked about this with psychologist and narcissism specialist Craig Malkin.
It's about being so self-centered so consistently that it actually interferes with your relationships, your ability to work, and can translate into some really crappy behaviors. Craig calls them the triple E.
So to be diagnosed with narcissistic personality disorder, the DSM, which is like the psychological Bible, says you need to display a pattern of grandiosity, need for admiration, and lack of empathy.
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