Gender and National Collective Narcissism: Gender Asymmetries and Obstacles to Gender Equality Part 2
Gender and National Collective Narcissism: Gender Asymmetries and Obstacles to Gender Equality
Link: https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/s11199-024-01443-8.pdf
Pasteable Citation
Golec de Zavala, A., & Keenan, O. (2024). Gender and national collective narcissism: Gender asymmetries and obstacles to gender equality. Sex Roles, 90(4), 565-586.
Men who were satisfied with their ingroup membership as men as opposed to narcissistic about it were much less strongly associated with sexism.
Gender ingroup satisfaction among men in Poland has also demonstrated a significantly weaker association with sexism than gender collective narcissism (Golec de Zavala & Bierwiaczonek, 2021). Further, among women, unlike gender collective narcissism, gender ingroup satisfaction does not predict distress and anger at the exclusion of other women (Golec de Zavala, 2022). Thus, our expectations regarding predictions of gender collective narcissism do not extend to non-narcissistic gender ingroup satisfaction. Similarly, our predictions regarding national narcissism discussed below do not extend to national ingroup satisfaction.
Though this case focuses on Poland, there are many interesting implications for America. Interestingly, where many Americans premise their ingroup satisfaction on America’s inclusiveness and its idea of the American dream and equal access to it antithetical to such racism and sexism, a large and potentially disturbing amount of Americans view it instead as a large body of white male founders and are proud of it simply because of that image. Ironically, this image is in direct opposition to the poverty, madness, and abuses of the English monarchy at the time that actually are more aligned with the egalitarianism behind anti-racism and anti-misogyny. Yet, as usual, when inconvenient to the narcissist, white male narcissists as experienced in the American narcissistic collective do not take the logic of these conclusions to their inconveniencing natural conclusion and focus instead on the look of relatively low class now middle to high class white men put in sudden power by justice and equality principles (but somehow these principles should suddenly be hushed up and ignored when they can be derived to also go further and apply to women and minorities, belying the singularly narcissistic rationalization and the narcissistic interpretation).
National narcissism is likely to be an obstacle in pursuit of gender equality among men and women because it is associated with the endorsement of national norms and values (Golec de Zavala et al., 2019; Mole et al., 2022). Those values reflect the interests of advantaged groups within the nation (Brewer et al., 2013; Devos et al., 2010; Sidanius et al., 1997), and in patriarchal societies, the national norms reflect the interests and values of men (Molina et al., 2014; van Berkel et al., 2017). Indeed, findings have linked stronger national identification to greater legitimization of existing inequalities among members of advantaged and disadvantaged groups (Caricati et al., 2021; Jaśko & Kossowska, 2013; Mähönen & Jasinskaja-Lahti, 2015), as well as more system-justifying political conservatism (Jost, 2019; van der Toorn et al., 2014) and gender inequality-justifying sexism (Glick & Fiske, 2001). In addition, national and gender identification have shown to be more strongly associated among men than women (van Berkel et al., 2017)
The findings were again applied to America. Given this understanding of national narcissism, in the American narcissistic collective (those in a collective specifically premised narcissistically on being American) the men were more likely to not support gender equality, often to the disturbance of ingroup satisfied nationalists can be applied to America, for instance Americans who liked and admired America for these very principles of weighing people for their character not their race (in either direction), justice for all (the pledge) and the image of the statue of liberty (the image of class mobility, and America’s international reputation for competence with it).
However, these findings are at odds with results indicating that a sense of shared national identity is associated with acceptance of diversity, inclusivity, support for disadvantaged groups, and a preference for egalitarian social systems (Brewer et al., 2013; Doucerain et al., 2018; Dovidio et al., 2016; Osborne et al., 2019; Sidanius et al., 1997). This inconsistency may be related to the fact that national identification is a broad concept. Its association with attitudes towards gender equality may be different depending on which aspect of national identification is taken into account. We argue that national narcissism is the specific variable linked to endorsement of the interests of advantaged groups and projection of the advantaged groups’ interests onto the whole nation. Thus, national narcissism specifically should predict less support for gender equality among men and women. Previous studies might have produced inconsistent results because they used national identification measures that varied with respect to the extent to which they tapped national narcissism
National narcissism was robustly associated with prejudice across the board, often found in the justification/rationalization/even actual and deliberate manufacturing of a narrative in support of racism, sexism, anti-gay, and anti-immigrant rhetoric
In support of this argument, past studies have shown that national narcissism is robustly associated with prejudice justifying group-based inequalities within the nation, including racism (Golec de Zavala et al., 2020), sexism (Golec de Zavala & Bierwiaczonek, 2021), anti-gay attitudes (Mole et al., 2022), and prejudice towards immigrants and refugees (Golec de Zavala et al., 2017; Hase et al., 2021).
In Poland, collective narcissism was identifiable by its position that LGBTQIA+ people threaten the moral integrity of Poland and clear prejudice that followed.
Moreover, studies have demonstrated a strong overlap between national narcissism and Catholic (i.e., the dominant religion in Poland) collective narcissism in Poland. Polish and Catholic collective narcissism (but not ingroup satisfaction) predict more sexism (Golec de Zavala & Bierwiaczonek, 2021) and prejudice towards sexual minorities via the belief that members of the LGBTQIA +community do not represent the nation but threaten its moral integrity (Mole et al., 2022).
The use of “national values” to rationalize acts of collective narcissism was seen repeatedly as well. Interestingly, the ingroup satisfaction nationalists likely did not agree at all that these acts of narcissism were values, but rather anti-values, namely clear and obvious prejudice that made their country look bad, not better.
National narcissism is also related to support for ultraconservative populism that advocates enhancement of privileges of advantaged groups as rooted in ‘traditional national values’ (Golec de Zavala & Keenan, 2021).
The most blatant instantiation of emphasizing women don’t fit the “prototype” of an advantaged nationalist can be seen in rhetoric literally saying “none of this is made/designed for you”. This is specifically found in collective narcissists, and though this particular feature is mentioned for Poland, I have often seen this exact line tried to be pulled by men who view themselves as part of the advantaged class, no matter how much the advantaged class may disagree.
Sociological analyses also indicate that the claim of women’s worse fit to national prototypicality is used to legitimize their increasingly disadvantaged status in Poland (Graff & Korolczuk, 2022). In contrast, national ingroup satisfaction is associated with intergroup tolerance and not associated with prejudice (Golec de Zavala, 2023). Those findings suggest that (1) national narcissism specifically should predict legitimization of gender inequality and rejection of collective action for gender equality and (2) the association between national narcissism and gender collective narcissism should be stronger among men than among women.
Poland has a similarly bad gender parity to America and is known pretty well internationally for its comparatively bad gender equality.
Across three studies, we examine national narcissism and gender collective narcissism as potential explanations for gender differences in the support of gender equality among women and men in Poland, a country ranked 75th in gender equality among 157 countries World Population Review (2022) and where women’s reproductive rights have recently been severely limited. First, in Study 1, we establish that gender collective narcissism is the same variable among men and women. We argue that men’s gender collective narcissism reflects claims of an exaggerated sense of the ingroup’s greatness whereas women’s gender collective narcissism reflects claims of their actual less recognized status. However, it is important to note that crucial to collective narcissism is the conviction that the ingroup should be recognized as better than others, not as equal.
Gender narcissism predicted also being ingroup satisfied with the gender, but was differentiated by clear zero sum beliefs, i.e., where the men who were just ingroup satisfied didn’t feel threatened with supporting and showing solidarity to women’s rights while enjoying being male and not particularly disliking it, men in the narcissistic collective actively viewed their membership as the defeat of women (the defining features of the narcissist is an inherently socially-comparative zero-sum and an inability to truly think synergetically).
To establish the conceptual equivalence of gender collective narcissism among men and women, we first determine measurement invariance of gender collective narcissism among men and women. Next, we validate the concept showing that gender collective narcissism makes the same predictions among men and women. Namely, we predict that gender collective narcissism will be positively associated with gender ingroup satisfaction, zero-sum beliefs about gender relations and gender intergroup antagonism among men and women. Those predictions are derived from collective narcissism theory and have been supported by multiple findings in contexts of other group memberships (for a review see, Golec de Zavala, 2023).
Collective narcissists in advantaged groups want to advance inequalities, like ongoing acts I have seen such as trying to keep intelligent discussion from women’s only spaces and moving it to male-favoring spaces or lowly populated spaces to minimize impact; actively and knowledgeably doing that) and that collective narcissists in disadvantaged groups were identifiable for using equality narratives and then discarding them and could be identified by their post-justice behavior, namely discarding everything that got them there like those factors weren’t the very reason why it had happened. At higher gender collective narcissism, both male and female gender narcissists were more likely to get oppositional and high-conflict, which, again, when factually considered in the same national ingroup, is considered unfit. Interestingly it might also predict that those with low gender narcissism in a disadvantaged group, aka those that may be selected for but themselves not really identify or feel pride in their disadvantaged group membership, are more likely to not support gender equality (for example, a woman that feels ambivalent towards or even actively doesn’t personally identify as or want to be female is more likely to not protect/endorse gender equality)
In Study 2 and 3, we test several pre-registered hypotheses regarding the role of national narcissism and gender collective narcissism in pursuit of gender equality. We argue that collective narcissists in advantaged groups want to advance inequalities, whereas collective narcissists in disadvantaged groups would support equality even if what they really want is to flip rather than attenuate social hierarchies. Thus, we propose that men and women will be more likely to endorse opposing attitudes towards gender equality at high levels of gender collective narcissism. Specifically, we predict that men will be more likely to oppose gender equality at high levels of gender collective narcissism, and more likely to support gender equality at low levels of gender collective narcissism. Women will be more likely to support gender equality at high levels of gender narcissism, and less likely to support gender equality at low levels of gender collective narcissism (Hypothesis 1). It is plausible that inconsistent findings regarding the association between ingroup identification and support for unequal social systems among advantaged group members (pointing to either positive or negative relationships; Radke et al., 2020) might have been produced by studies using ingroup identification measures that tap some degree of collective narcissism.
Other hypotheses were made about low and high levels of gender narcissism.
We also propose that women and men will report similar attitudes toward gender equality at high levels of national narcissism, showing different patterns from what is observed at high levels of gender collective narcissism among women, and thus illuminating when members of a disadvantaged group may endorse beliefs that harm their ingroup. Specifically, we predict that women and men will be less likely to support gender equality at high levels of national narcissism, but more likely to support gender equality at low levels of national narcissism (Hypothesis 2). Further, we predict that the association between gender collective narcissism and national narcissism will be weaker among women than among men (Hypothesis 3)