APPLYING IMPLICIT MEASURES TO ASSESS NARCISSISM

Narcissism is a personality trait characterizing individuals with a grandiose sense of themselves, a lack of empathy and a marked tendency to devaluate other people (e.g. Kohut, 1968; Kernberg, 1967). In order to assess both normal and pathological facets of narcissism, different self-report instruments were developed (e.g. NPI; Raskin e Hall, 1979). Importantly, grandiose self-views and devaluations of other people are particularly prone to impression management and self-deceptive attempts, and thus, self-report scores of narcissism may be considerably biased in order to preserve social and private self-image. Recently, dual models of social cognition were developed (e.g. Strack & Deutch, 2004), providing an interesting conceptual framework to address the factors that may threaten the validity of self-report measures. Many attempts have been conducted to develop reliable and valid implicit measures of psychological constructs (e.g. IAT; Greenwald, McGhee, & Schwartz, 1998; RRT; De Houwer et al., 2015). The present study is aimed at applying for the first time the IAT and the RRT to measure narcissism evaluating their psychometric characteristics, reliability and validity. A Narcissism IAT and Narcissism RRT along with a series of other instruments were administered to 103 students (78 females), with a mean age of 24.31 (SD = 7.34), recruited at the Sapienza University of Rome. An adequate reliability emerged for both implicit measures of narcissism, and significant correlations of small-moderate size were found with self-report measures of narcissism, and other linked constructs (p < .05), supporting their construct and criterion validity. These results provided a first evidence for the validity of these new implicit measures. Other studies will be conducted in order to assess their discriminative power for the distinction between healthy and pathological narcissism.