Narcissism is a term that gets used constantly – but what does it actually mean in psychological terms, and how is it shaping our society? In this episode, Dr. Phil Stieg speaks with leading expert Dr. Keith Campbell to separate myth from science.
Drawing from his book The New Science of Narcissism, Dr. Campbell explains the difference between everyday self-focused traits and the far rarer personality disorder, unpacks the two distinct expressions of grandiose and vulnerable narcissism, and explores how these patterns influence our relationships, leadership, parenting, and culture.
Plus, let’s spend some time with the “O.G.” narcissist
Phil Stieg
Narcissism is a term that gets thrown around often. But what does it really mean in psychological terms and how is it shaping our society? This week, we’re joined by Dr. Keith Campbell, a leading expert on narcissism and a professor of psychology at the University of Georgia. Through decades of research, Dr. Campbell has explored the roots, risks, and realities of narcissistic behavior, helping us understand when self-love becomes self-delusion. He joins us to break down how these traits impact our relationships, our mental health, and our culture increasingly obsessed with the “self”.
Keith, thanks so much for being with us today.
Keith Campbell
Thanks for having me.
Phil Stieg
Since you’ve spent decades studying this, I guess I should ask you to define the difference between narcissism and narcissistic personality disorder, because I think that’s where people get caught up.
Keith Campbell
Narcissism is one of those terms that people use a lot, and they don’t really know what it means, except maybe jerk. So when people use it, maybe stuck up is a good one. But you’re right, there’s a couple of things going on.
First, we can talk about narcissism as a personality trait, and that means that most of us are somewhere in the middle, and some of us have higher levels of narcissism, and some of us have lower levels of narcissism. And then the question is, well, what is that narcissism that you’re talking about mean?
And it turns out, for various historical reasons I’m happy to discuss, we have really two things we’re talking about when we talk about personality narcissism or narcissistic personality, which is more grandiose narcissism and more vulnerable narcissism.
Phil Stieg
What was the second one? More…
Keith Campbell
Vulnerable. It’s hard for me to put out vulnerable.
It’s the two faces of narcissism we see in normal populations. And what most people listening, when they think about narcissism, we’re going to think about the grandiose form. It’s somebody who’s confident, socially assertive, extroverted, has a high sense of entitlement, a high sense of self-importance, maybe lacks empathy or caring in relationships. Not that they’re antisocial, but they don’t really have deep warm feelings towards people. But they need to use their social world and their social relationships in order to bolster and maintain a positive self-image or self-esteem, which is a fancy way of saying, grandiose narcissists want to look powerful, special, and important, and they use other people to do that.
Another form of narcissism is this more defensive or vulnerable form of narcissism. And these are people that have the similar levels of self-importance. I’m a big deal. I’m special. Things should go my way. I’m entitled. But instead of being confident and extroverted, they’re a little more neurotic and have some low self-esteem. So when that happens, you get a lot of fantasies of narcissism. You think what a great person is, you fantasize about when you’re a big professor, physician or whatever, but you don’t do much. You live in your fantasy world and you get maybe a little depressed.
As you might have guessed, what happens is the vulnerable narcissists will go to therapy more because they’re suffering, and the grandiose narcissists go into politics. (laugh)
Phil Stieg
And there you have it.
Keith Campbell
And there you have it. And so when you discuss narcissism with clinicians or a psychiatrist, you hear a lot more about vulnerability and insecurity. And when you talk about it with people in the forensic, legal or political world, you hear more about assertiveness, dominance, and meanness.
And as you said, appropriately, at the beginning, we also have a clinical version or a personality disorder. So what happens with personality disorders is you take the trait of narcissism. You make it extreme, so I’m very narcissistic, and you make it inflexible, meaning I can’t really turn it on or off.
So if I’m in front of a classroom, I want to sound pretty confident. I want to be charming. I want to be engaging. Narcissism isn’t a bad thing. I go home and see my kids, and I want them to tell me what a big deal I am and how smart I am. Narcissism is going to damage my Relationships.
So a narcissism becomes extreme and inflexible, and it leads to what psychiatrists call clinically significant impairment, and that’s usually your relationships get damaged. Sometimes it’s emotional regulation that’s the problem. You get this narcissistic rage when things don’t go your way. It can also be decision making goes awry because of your overconfidence. You start doing risky and silly things because of your grandiose overconfidence. Then it can be diagnosed as a clinical disorder.
Phil Stieg
I was shocked that really only 2-3% of the population has this personality disorder. So when we’re talking about the people that we think are narcissistic, they don’t have that extreme form.
Keith Campbell
Yeah. So that’s a really good point. When you look at the point prevalence, which means at any one time, what % of the population has narcissistic personality disorder? Full-blown, you’re looking maybe 1, 2, 3%. It’s a lower number than I thought when they first looked at the data. But you have a lot of high functioning, narcissistic individuals running around that are doing damage.
Phil Stieg
We’re going to get into that. (laugh)
Keith Campbell
And they’re doing some good stuff, too. They’re entertaining, but they’re also doing some damage. But it might not be a clinical disorder because it doesn’t have the significant level of impairment.
Phil Stieg
In reading your book one of the things I was thinking about is the narcissists that I know, they don’t really lack empathy, certainly the grandiose ones. They have a lot of empathy as long as it’s good for them to be empathic.
Keith Campbell
That’s one of these really key points, because empathy can be cognitive or emotional, meaning I can understand you empathetically, but not really have warm feelings towards you, or I can have that warm feelings towards you of more emotional empathy. And what you see with narcissism is this cognitive empathy, because if you’re going to manipulate people, you have to know what makes them work. And if people love you, you love them back. I mean, people that are narcissistic will fall in love, and it’s very ego-based, and it feels good, and so they will have some of those feelings.
So there is empathy with narcissism. It may be better described as impaired or one-way empathy. It only accounts if it helps the narcissist, not really if it hurts them. But it isn’t the case with narcissism that you’re dealing with people that are emotionalists. Sort of that cold psychopathic personality profile isn’t really narcissism, except maybe in the most malignant form.
Phil Stieg
When thinking about Narcissism, how do you differentiate that from a high level of self-esteem?
Keith Campbell
Narcissism and self-esteem will correlate, but they’re not… So people were often… They’ll come up with a couple of theories. One is that narcissism is really super high self-esteem. Like your self-esteem is so high, it bleeds into narcissism. The other theory people have is a donut model. It’s like you have low self-esteem deep down inside, and then you cover that up with high self-esteem, like a shell or the outside of a donut. And that’s how narcissism relates to self-esteem.
I think there’s maybe some truth to both those. But generally, what we find is that people with high self-esteem say, yeah, I’m a good person. I’m on an equal plane with others. I have a lot of good qualities. But they also say, I’m a person of worth like other people. So they value others as well as themselves. The self-esteem with high self-esteem is split between what we call more agentic domains like attractiveness, intelligence, power, dominance, and also more communal domains, things like love, warm, affection. So somebody with high self seem to be like, I’m a nice person. I’m pretty smart. I’m pretty good-looking.
A narcissist puts it all in the agency bucket. There’s one exception to this you don’t have to ask about. But they put it in the agency bucket. They say, I’m better looking than other people. I’m smarter than other people. I’m more powerful. I’m more special. I’m more important. I’m not nicer. I’m not necessarily more moral. That can be for the losers. But I am the top dog. It’s a very narrow form of self-esteem.
Phil Stieg
It leads into my next question about “gaslighting” and “love bombing”. The dark side of the personality. Why are they used to describe narcissists?
Keith Campbell
So these are the two terms that have emerged out of the popular cultural mind in the discussion of narcissism that people started to study. The first term you’re mentioning is gaslighting. It’s such a strange term because it comes originally from a British play that was made into a movie, and then an American movie, I think, with Angela Lansbury in it. It’s a story of a husband who essentially manipulates his wife, makes her go crazy by doing things like changing the gas lights in the house. So he puts the gas lights down. She goes, “Are the gas lights down?” “No, you’re going crazy”. You rattle stuff in the attic. “What’s going on?” “Nothing. You must be going crazy” .
So what he’s doing is systematically breaking his wife’s connection with reality. He’s breaking all those connections with reality, and then as they’re under control. This is what cult leaders do. They take you away from your family, take away you away from everything you love, disconnect you from reality, and then the narcissist becomes the source of reality.
Phil Stieg
Do you think that cult leaders are inherently grandiose narcissists?
Keith Campbell
I think that’s the classic model, yeah. Okay. And very good religious leaders, too.
Phil Stieg
And the love bombing?
Keith Campbell
Yeah. And so love bombing is an interesting one. We have a little bit of research on manipulation and gaslighting. Love bombing is different. It’s at the very beginning of a relationship. People report that narcissists will be incredibly affectionate, tell them how much they love them, tell them how great they are, paint the picture of a very bright future.
It’s a very interesting process where the relationship with narcissists often start off in a positive light, with this love bombing, with excitement, with I’m dating somebody attractive. But over time, you see negative things.
First of all, the way we tend to work relationships in the US is we fall in love with somebody, it’s exciting, and then we get emotionally connected and committed to them. So it’s like we’re dating, it’s fun, and then we get deeper and more committed. You’re dating the narcissist, that second part doesn’t happen. You don’t get to know them, you don’t start meeting each other’s parents.
Second thing is, narcissists can be very manipulative, game-playing in the relationships. Gaslighting was an extreme example of manipulation we talked about. But simple game playing is things like just saying, I’m not committed. — I love you. You love me? No, I don’t love you that much. I mean, that’s straight out of the myth of Narcissis. It makes people destabilized. Narcissists will cheat. They’re just unfaithful. So you’re dating somebody narcissistic and they’re unfaithful, and then they lie. So they lie to you about their infidelity. Well, they make you think you’re crazy for thinking they’re unfaithful. They gaslight you. And then they can be really bad in the case of things like O. J. Simpson.
So you can get some violence. You can get couple violence. You can get extreme violence with narcissism. You can get all sorts of things. Imagine you’re dating somebody narcissistic and they feel like you’re their possession. You’re like their Porsche. You got to understand, they’re looking at you like an object that gets them esteem. So you’re dating this guy, you’re his Ferrari, and you go, I don’t want to be your Ferrari anymore. He goes, no, Ferrari doesn’t get a choice. Ferrari is my Ferrari. I can upgrade to a Bugatti, but you don’t get to leave. So You can get very controlling and very aggressive and violent relationships with narcissists. They spin people up. It can be very destructive.
Interstitial theme
Narrator
Let’s take a moment to consider the mythic origins of the original “narcissist”.
Ancient Greek background music
Born the son of a river god and a water nymph, Narcissus was believed to be the most beautiful man anyone had ever seen. True to form, no one in Ancient Greece believed this more than Narcissus himself.
As the years went by Narcissus became more beautiful. Wherever he went, both men and women fell in love with him. Yet he spurned all potential lovers – deeming them unworthy of his great beauty, and leaving behind a trail of broken hearts.
One day, a nymph named Echo came to earth looking for love. Having been cast out by the gods for her notorious gossiping, Echo was cursed and could no longer speak for herself. She could only repeat the last words of anyone who spoke to her.
By chance she saw that lovely young man, Narcissus. She fell in love with him at once, but her curse made it nearly impossible to declare her love. She followed him for months, waiting for a chance to approach him.
Narcissus was out hunting one day when he got separated from his companions and was lost in the forest. Narcissus called out:
Narcissus
‘Is anybody here?’
Narrator
Echo joyfully stole the word:
Echo
‘Here!’
Narcissus
‘Then come to me, come to me!‘
Narrator
She ran to him. She put her arms around him. He pushed her away.
Narcissus
‘Get off me! What are you? I suppose like all the others you love me.’
Echo
‘Love me… Love me…’
Narcissus
‘I would rather die than let you lie with me.‘
Echo
‘Lie with me… Lie with me…‘
Narcissus
‘Leave me alone.’
Echo
‘Alone … Alone…
Narrator
And with that he fled.
Poor Echo was so crushed by this rejection that her body withered away to nothing. Only her voice survived, hiding in caves, and among high hills.
The goddess of revenge (aptly named Nemesis) took pity on the fate of Echo and decided to punish Narcissus by making him a victim of his own pride.
The next time Narcissus went to a pool to drink, he leaned over the side and saw in the reflection a face of such indescribable beauty. He thought to himself :
Narcissus
Finally, here is someone worthy of my love!
Narrator
He leaned forward to kiss it but it the image broke into wrinkles. Every time he tried to reach out and embrace the object of his love – it would disappear.
He lay beside the pool transfixed by his own reflection. No thought of food or drink would take him from the spot. At last he said,
Narcissus
I think I understand: I am in love with myself. Always we will be together and yet always we will be apart. I have loved you in vain.’
Narrator
Echo took the words:
Echo
‘I have loved you in vain.
Narrator
Narcissus perished on the bank of the pool. After his body had returned to the earth, a bed of white and yellow flowers sprouted on the spot where he had lain. Today we call these flowers Narcissus, because their long slender stalks bend towards the water admiring their own reflection, much as their namesake had done in ancient times.
Phil Stieg
You talk about how narcissistic traits develop, What can we, as parents, avoid in the parenting role to help make sure that our children don’t develop that personality disorder?
Keith Campbell
Yeah, so that is a question I get a lot, and it’s never from narcissistic parents. It’s always from these really nice people. They’re like, I don’t want my kid to be narcissistic. And I’m like, They’re not. You’re okay. So when we look at narcissism, first of all, like all personality traits, there’s a lot of genetics at play. It gets real technical, but there’s a big genetic component. And then with parenting, it’s a lot smaller. We generally find parenting has a pretty small effect. But with grandiose narcissism, what you tend to see are parents who put their child on a pedestal, are very permissive, let them get away with things. It’s the special child model. And with vulnerable narcissism, you see more cold They’re a negative, toxic parenting, like you see with most personality problems.
We talk about helicopter parents who hover over their kids and make sure that they don’t have any threats or snowplow parents that blow everything out, obstacles out of the way so the kids don’t have challenges.
I think that has a benefit and a cost. Obviously, when things are tough, throwing your kids to the wolves might let the wolves eat them. So it’s not bad to be a parent. But the risk of being a helicopter parent is your child never has to face the consequences of their own actions or has to come up with the courage to act on their own.
And so if you don’t do that, what it allows you to do as a child is tell yourself a story about how great and important and successful you are without ever having to test that against reality. And you can tell yourself that story a long time, but it’s going to leave a little bit of a hole because there’s no reality behind it.
Now, I don’t think that’s necessarily going to lead to grandiose narcissism. I think generally it’s going to lead to maybe what you might think of as false esteem or an inflated false self, but not necessarily classical narcissism.
Phil Stieg
And you talk a little bit about parenting and the CPR method. Can you define for me the mnemonic you use for CPR? What is that and how it relates to parenting?
Keith Campbell
When I talk about the CPR method, it’s the parents that are like, give me something, please. I want to be sure. And the CPR stands for Compassion, Passion, and Responsibility. And these are three really important buffers to narcissism. So the first is, with compassion, if you care about people and you’re able to love people, you can be really confident, but you’re not going to be that narcissistic because relationships buffer our ego.
I mean, I can only have so big of an ego because I’m married. If it gets too big, it gets deflated quickly. And that’s a good thing.
So having compassion and supporting compassion is really important, and people understand that. The next one people don’t think about as much is “passion”. So with narcissism, it’s very much about status and success. But the status and success is about gaining adulation and esteem and inflating your ego. You’re doing things for the applause. You’re in it for the trophy. You’re in it for the rings. In football, we call them ring chasers.
When you do things for love, for the flow state, for the experience, for the passion they bring, you can be just as successful as the people doing it for the ego. You’ll get just as much praise In fact, you’ll probably be more because when you’re around passionate people, you are drawn to them. They’re very magnetic. You’ll get all that ego stuff, but without the ego inflation, because you’re doing it out of love. So it’s a way of being successful without focusing on yourself and praise and everything else.
And finally is responsibility taking. Narcissists will take responsibility for good things all day. You win and you’ll get on TV and go, I won. I’m awesome. Where the problem is with narcissism is taking responsibility for mistakes or failures or flaws. And so if you can learn to do that, to just say, Yeah, I screwed up. I own this one. I’m going to make it right. That gets rid of some of the ego, gives you a little humility, but it also gives you agency. It gives you the ability to respond.
So you’re like “Hey, I screwed up. It’s my fault. I’m going to respond”. Like I said, it gives you capacity to act in the world. So I think that responsibility taking is a really good practice. I mean, even take responsibility when it’s not yours. Take some heat off, especially if you got people You’ve got people under you. If you take responsibility for their screw-ups, they’ll be loyal. It’s a good thing to do.
Phil Stieg
Do you think that the grandiose narcissist is attracted to a particular occupation and the vulnerable narcissist is attracted to a different type of occupation. Can you lump people like that?
Keith Campbell
You can. With grandiosity, you can. And grandiose narcissists, you’re going to find people in leadership, politics, high performance pursuits. If you look in the medical profession, surgeons are going to be more narcissistic than whatever your everyday practitioners.
And so you’ll find, narcissists gravitate to the highest status areas where they could get attention and have social power and social prestige. And that’s not necessarily a bad thing. I just want to say in defense of my narcissistic physician friends, because I’ve talked to them about it. What they’ve told me is that if I care too much and somebody dies, I’m not going to be able to function anymore. I have to care about people a lot, but I can’t let that care overwhelm me. I have to be a little bit calloused to do my job, just like if I were in the military, just like if I’m an emergency surgeon and it’s a really tough time, I got to just make hard calls and put my emotions aside.
So when I say you find narcissism in these areas, I’m not saying NPD, I’m not saying it’s that. I’m saying it demands a certain performance profile, like fighter pilots or early astronauts are going to be more narcissistic.
Phil Stieg
When I was thinking about the answer to the question I asked, I was looking at your treatment section, and I was enlightened by the fact that when you’re dealing with a narcissist, you actually try to get them engaged the fact that if you do it this way, it’s going to be more beneficial for you. They’re going to like you more.
Keith Campbell
Like a communal shift idea. Yeah, so that’s great.
So what happens is I can do good things that help the world, and I can also have people tell me I’m a hero and a legend, and I can get my narcissistic needs met at the same time I’m doing good. So if you can build an alignment between where you’re getting your esteem needs met and the good you’re doing, you can have narcissism be very prosocial for a long time. And what happens in those cases, and we have a few famous historical psychologists that might fall under this, is that the world sees you as this gifted, loving healer, and your kids see you as a monster. But But at least you’re healing a lot of people.
Phil Stieg
Is there a gender difference? Are there more men that are narcissist than women or vice versa?
Keith Campbell
Yeah. So usually with grandiose narcissism, you’re going to see higher scores with men. In terms of the personality trait, the correlations like 0.2, which isn’t really big. When you look at the personality disorder or the most extreme ends of narcissism, you see it maybe three to one, men to women. So men are much more likely to be diagnosed as having narcissistic personality disorder. Part of that, I think it’s because men are more narcissistic. Part of it, though, could be a diagnostic bias, where when you see a certain set of traits with men, you say that’s narcissism. And with women, maybe you say it’s histrionism and or borderline personality disorder. So it’s possible that there’s a little bit of gendering in the diagnosis itself, because you don’t see men as much diagnosed with borderline or histrionic personality disorder as women. There could be some of that going on, but generally, the real ego you’re going to see more men.
Phil Stieg
Are we trying to say that psychologists and psychiatrists can be sexist?
Keith Campbell
Well, yeah, I think so. I think we have these stereotypes of how these things manifest.
Phil Stieg
So best to get multiple opinions as to what your diagnosis might actually be?
Keith Campbell
Yeah, and the truth is the treatment is probably going to be about the same. So you can use a borderline style treatment, like the dialectical behavior therapy for narcissism, and it should be okay. They bleed into each other.
Phil Stieg
Let’s use the example of you’re married, you’ve got a couple of kids, and since most men are more commonly narcissistic. You, the wife, all of a sudden realize, or maybe you did have an inkling and you say, I’m going to play along with this because he’s pretty successful, and I’m enjoying the benefits of that success. How do you deal with that constructively?
Keith Campbell
It’s really hard because one of the things… If you’re just dating somebody, you go, Oh, my God, this person’s a jerk. I’m like, Just get out. Just bail. It’s not worth it. You got some kids with people. You’ve a lifestyle established, you have a lot of investments in a relationship, and leaving is really hard. And so, like you’re saying, what do you do, especially if you benefit half of it? You’re like, I like half of this person. I like but I just don’t like this other half. Well, what you can do is try to set boundaries to get more of that other half. You could do what we talked about earlier, saying, Hey, you’re so great at work. I’m so glad I married a successful investment banker. This is awesome. You know what would be the most awesome is when I see you with the kids, though, I feel such pride. I know you’re a baller on Wall Street, and you’re a great father, too, and that’s just incredible.
Phil Stieg
So you play into their narcissism. Play into their narcissism. I constructively try to get them to do the good things that…
Keith Campbell
Exactly. So don’t say… And the other thing is when you’re dealing with somebody who’s narcissistic, you don’t go, “Look, you’re a narcissist. Change.” Because it’s like, you go, “I love these five things. This specific behavior, I think we should work on.” So you keep it at the very behavioral level and frame it in terms of this will make you more loved, just a more powerful and effective and loved person.
Phil Stieg
So not everybody can be the CEO of Apple and Tesla or GM or the President of the United States or a major political figure star of stage and screen. But you do talk in the end of the book about positive narcissistic traits. And so since you’re a psychologist and you’re trying to get a balanced society out here, tell us what you see as the positive, you listed them in the book, positive narcissistic traits that all of us should actually strive for.
Keith Campbell
Narcissism is really great for certain things. It’s great for public speaking. You got to go talk to in front of 100 people. Narcissism helps. It’s great for meeting people. It’s great for meeting people at bars. If you want to go date somebody, being narcissistic helps. If you want to self-promote, which we all are supposed to do these days, as part of our job, being narcissistic helps.
It’s good, generally in the short term, it’s good for rising to leadership. So in research on who emerges as leadership – there’s a really important concept in leadership called the leadership emergence, just in a group who’s going to rise to the top. And narcissism predicts that. So it predicts a lot of things in the short term that are really effective.
And I think the costs of narcissism are usually borne in the long term because you become self-centered, you lose social connection, you’re a jerk on the way up, and no one cares about you on the way down, and you ruin your relationships. It’s very hard to have a loving relationship if you’re really narcissistic. So there are these long term consequences, and then there’s consequences that everyone around you has to suffer from your narcissism. Your wife suffers, your kids, your friends, that kind of thing.
Phil Stieg
But one of the things that you did cite as a positive trait was building broad and shallow networks.
Keith Campbell
Oh, yeah.
Phil Stieg
Which surprised me.
Keith Campbell
Oh, no.
Phil Stieg
What’s good about shallow networks?
Keith Campbell
That’s how they built the Internet. I mean, how do you think they built Facebook? They didn’t want to pay anybody because they just got a bunch of people and said, Use your ego. And so when you look at social media and you look across networks, the people who are narcissistic just have more connections. They have more friends, they have more followers. They just have these broader, shallower networks of people. And that’s great. If you need to get a message out there, you need to connect with somebody, you need to connect people, you don’t have the depth, but you do have the breadth.
Phil Stieg
Is being a leader or being a politician a learned behavior, or is it a behavior trait that you have, and because you have it, you gravitate into those areas?
Keith Campbell
I think it’s a little bit of a dynamic where there are people that have some natural leadership, and then you can learn to play off that. And obviously, a lot of us, being a leader is really important. I mean, I’ve run things, you’ve run things. It’s important to do a good job, and there’s a lot of training available. So you can be a really good leader. You don’t have to be a Narcissist. It’s just when you look at the world, you just see a lot of it.
Same way, if I went to a studio, whatever, ever disco at 2:00 in the morning on a Saturday night, I’m going to see more narcissists than I would in the morning. You’re going to see more in politics than you would someplace else.
Phil Stieg
Yeah.
You’ve seen that skit where the neurosurgeon is standing at the party and then he meets a nuclear physicist that he gets intimidated by him?
Keith Campbell
No. That’s great!
Phil Stieg
It’s a good skit. If I can find it in my cell phone, I’ll send it to you.
Dr. Keith Campbell, This has been an enlightening discussion on the topic of narcissism. I want to recommend your book to all of our listeners called The New Science of Narcissim. It’s encyclopedic and insightful. Thank you so much for being with us today. It’s been great fun.
Keith Campbell
Thanks, same. It’s been fun for me as well.
