Me, me, me! America’s ‘Narcissism Epidemic’

The kernel of the idea for this book was planted in 1999 in a basement office at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland. We were both working as postdocs — a kind of research limbo between graduate school and hoped-for professorships — in the lab of Roy Baumeister, a well-known social psychologist. There's not much to do in Cleveland, especially in the winter, so we ended up talking a lot in our shared office. Sometimes we were actively procrastinating — Jean recalls one conversation about weight loss in which our fellow postdoc Julie Exline described a diet pill that supposedly contained a tapeworm. Before she could even finish the story, Keith began yelling "Urban legend!" and looked it up on the nascent Internet (he was right). Most of the time, though, we talked about ideas. Keith would describe his latest study on the behavior of narcissistic people, and Jean would talk about trends in American culture and how they were showing up in personality traits. Almost immediately we thought about looking at trends in narcissism, but in 1999 the standard measure of narcissism had only been around for 10 years, which wasn't long enough to do a solid study of change over time.

That study would have to wait for the summer of 2006, when Jean was seven months pregnant and couldn't do much but sit at her computer. By then, we had both married and settled into jobs across the country from each other (Keith at the University of Georgia, far from where he grew up in Southern California, and Jean at San Diego State University, far from where she grew up in Minnesota and Texas). Our coauthors on this project were renowned narcissism and aggression researcher Brad Bushman and two former students (now faculty), Joshua Foster and Sara Konrath. The rise in college students' narcissism over the generations was clear, and when we released the study in February 2007, it was covered by the Associated Press and many other news outlets. It was an interesting first day back on the job for Jean after a four-month maternity leave. One TV crew setting up a standard "walking" shot asked Jean to carry her briefcase so she would "look more professional." "Guys," Jean said, "That's not my briefcase. It's my breast pump."

When Jean got home that night, the full impact hit her: the story had been covered by the NBC Nightly News, Fox News Channel, and National Public Radio, and both Jay Leno and Conan O'Brien made jokes about it. The AP story appeared in more than one hundred newspapers around the country, prompting a slew of editorials, newspaper columns, and e-mails. Much of the feedback was positive, but we also received intense questioning and harsh criticism, some of it based on misunderstandings about what narcissism is and how it is measured.

That was when we realized we'd hit a nerve. We also realized that the narcissism epidemic went far beyond the changing personalities of college students. The American culture was shifting in a fundamental way, and we wanted to document it — and figure out how to stop it. Every time we turned on the TV, it seemed that another symptom of narcissism was rearing its ugly head — Botox ads, the mortgage meltdown, fake paparazzi. We found so many examples of narcissism in American culture that we had to stop collecting them. This book could have been twice as long.

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We want this book to be a wake-up call. In contrast to the obesity epidemic, which has been widely publicized, Americans have become inured to the incivility, exhibitionism, and celebrity obsession caused by the narcissism epidemic. It's taken for granted that a baby bib saying "Supermodel" is "cute." "Having changed ourselves, we no longer perceive our transformation," wrote Roger Kimball in the New Criterion. We've gotten so turned around that some people now argue that narcissism is good (as we discuss in Chapter 3, narcissism has some short-term benefits to the self, but is not good for other people, society, or even the narcissist himself in the long run). Even when trends are recognized for their negative effects — such as the fistfights on YouTube or teens posting inappropriate pictures of themselves online — people rarely connect the dots to see that these trends are all related to the rise in narcissism.

Recognizing the narcissism epidemic is the first step to stopping it. The analogy to the obesity epidemic is useful here. Definite steps are being taken to combat obesity: soda machines are being removed from schools, exercise programs suggested, and nutrition education plans implemented. Not so with narcissism. In many cases, the suggested cure for narcissistic behavior is "feeling good about yourself." After all, the thinking goes, fourteen-year-old Megan wouldn't post revealing pictures of herself on MySpace if she had higher self-esteem. So parents redouble their efforts, telling Megan she's special, beautiful, and great. This is like suggesting that an obese person would feel much better if she just ate more doughnuts. Megan wants everyone to see just how beautiful and special she is, and it's not because she thinks she is ugly — it's because she thinks she's hot and, perhaps more importantly, because she lives in a narcissistic society where she might garner praise, status, and "friends" by displaying blatant sexuality.

In fact, narcissism causes almost all of the things that Americans hoped high self-esteem would prevent, including aggression, materialism, lack of caring for others, and shallow values. In trying to build a society that celebrates high self-esteem, self-expression, and "loving yourself," Americans have inadvertently created more narcissists — and a culture that brings out the narcissistic behavior in all of us. This book chronicles American culture's journey from self-admiration, which seemed so good, to the corrosive narcissism that threatens to infect us all.

Excerpted from “The Narcissism Epidemic” by Jean M. Twenge and W. Keith Campbell. Copyright © 2009, reprinted with permission from Simon and Schuster.

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