William Chopik

So men are more narcissistic than women in most countries we studied.

But yeah, one surprise that the study yielded, and again, it's one of the bigger ones to ever do something like this, is that the collectivistic countries were actually a little bit more narcissistic than the individualistic ones.

And I think we were all shocked when we found that result.

Because we found other stuff that made sense.

So if a country has higher GDP, so if they're richer on average, they're more narcissistic too.

And we sort of understood that.

But yeah, I think people look at collectivism as this fuzzy thing that it's all this utilitarian utopia where everybody just gets along and they're all embedded and have amazing relationships.

But

There's actually a bunch of research to contradict that.

There's some research suggesting they're more competitive with each other, that they're more sensitive to hierarchy.

So narcissism is a good thing about hierarchy, right?

You think you should be at the top of the hierarchy.

So that was one thing that was very, very surprising, and it kind of turns conventional thinking on its head.

Yeah, so that's way more diagnostic about whether a country is narcissistic or not.

Or yeah, Singapore is a great example because it's this urban, highly developed, industrialized place.

So in some ways, it does share a lot of characteristics with American cities like New York City.

And, you know, there's big skyscrapers and there's business districts.

So, you know, yeah, don't get me wrong.

Cultures do differ in really important ways.

But then I think an underappreciated thing is that sometimes they're a little similar and not maybe so different than we think.