The Ass Scale

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Marion Pascal looked into existing scientific literature on the two subtypes of narcissism, grandiose and vulnerable. She found that none of these scales really got to the insecurity stuff they were looking for. One reason is because psychopaths don't feel insecure and narcissists generally don't know themselves that well. So there's a gap in these measures for motivation and for how one will behave in the real world when engaging in things that might reveal those vulnerabilities may exacerbate those insecurities.

In this episode we explore what narcissism is (and what is most-definitely is not).

There is a form of narcissism which has been, up until now, confused with psychopathy. But a new paper, the result of years of experiments, suggests narcissists are not psychopaths, and psychopaths are not narcissists.

In the psychological literature, narcissism comes in two varieties. Grandiose narcissists tend to really, truly love themselves and heavily manipulate their social environment for personal gain. Vulnerable narcissists don’t love themselves, not their true selves. Vulnerable narcissists love their image, and they are highly aware of the fact that it is an image and work very hard to prevent anyone else realizing that. According to the research explored in this episode, there is no such thing as a grandiose narcissist – that’s just another way to describe a psychopath.

Vulnerable narcissists like Don Draper in Mad Men cope with their insecurity by donning a mask, and then spend most of their lives protecting that mask out of a fear of what will happen if people ever see what it hides.