Maladaptation in Narcissism: Narcissists Adapt When They Shouldn’t and Don’t Know When To Stop Adapting, Leading to Grotesque/Unsustainable Adaptation
Maladaptation in Narcissism: Narcissists Adapt When They Shouldn’t and Don’t Know When To Stop Adapting, Leading to Grotesque/Unsustainable Adaptation – Differences in Adaption Strategies Between Narcissists and Non-Narcissists in Covid-19; A NIH Study of Collective Narcissism
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7363424/
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We focused on preventive and hoarding behaviors as common reactions toward the pandemic.
Dark Triad: Take as much for yourself as possible (hoarding), and do nothing to prevent transmission to others (social irresponsibility). Social irresponsibility + hoarding = malicious greed.
Participants characterized by the Dark Triad traits engaged less in prevention and more in hoarding.
Hoarding during an emergency = “every man to himself” way earlier than that should’ve been called when prevention is still possible with mass action, showing underlying antisocial and gross incompetence traits, frighteningly possessed by all those who fit within a large-scale collective narcissism analysis.
“whereas those characterized by collective narcissism engaged in more hoarding only.”
Beliefs, aka cognitions about health, can track dark triad patterns, and these dark triad behaviors can track large scale malicious greed/antisocial gross incompetence responses to emergencies that exacerbate the situation, before they even get the chance to inject maladaptation into the general populace’s evolving environment.
“The results point to the utility of health beliefs in predicting behaviors during the pandemic, explaining (at least in part) problematic behaviors associated with the dark personalities (i.e., Dark Triad, collective narcissism).”
Maladaption was an attempt to adapt correctly to the emergency that actually did not do much and in general created scarcities/issues for others by taking too much or doing too little, making the situation worse. It was seen most in dark triad traits, which explains their noxious effect. Maladaptation is called maladaption because it leads to a weaker population adapting where it shouldn’t and in ways it shouldn’t.
“However, the pandemic afforded researchers a unique opportunity to re-examine how personality traits relate to adaptive (e.g., washing one's hands) and maladaptive (e.g., overstocking on toilet paper) behaviors, and how these patterns may depend on one's beliefs about the virus.”
This study was novel and powerful due to the fact it tracked large scale behaviors starting at the verbal cognitive starting point, where they are highly malleable still, and showed a psychological features are in fact health and network infrastructure, and from there economic infrastructure, amenable to verbal intervention at the inception point of maladaptation if and when the conditions that lead to the maladaptive behaviors are detected early on.
“This opportunity was unique, not only because of the novelty and severity of COVID-19, but also because researchers could rely on more direct (or at least less retrospective) verbal reports of behavior.”
Refusal to follow government mandates was a red flag signal of antisocial leadership and dark triad traits in the area. Behaviors such as this are seen so far in places like Santa Monica, California and Everett, Washington, signaling poisoned environments with a large-scale dark triad-apologist/endorsing cognitive infection coming from some sort of influential institution, business, or point of informational dissemination.
“Additional traits, such as the Dark Triad (i.e., narcissism, Machiavellianism, psychopathy) and collective narcissism, have attracted less empirical attention, due to their self-oriented character along with their narrowband coverage of the personality space. These traits, however, may have implications for how one copes with the virus (e.g., via adaptive or preventive behavior such as washing hands) and how one's actions entail consequences for others (e.g., via maladaptive behavior such as hoarding supplies). For example, individuals characterized by the Dark Triad traits may be less likely to follow governmentally-enforced restrictions related to COVID-19 (Zajenkowski, Jonason, Leniarska, & Kozakiewicz, 2020). Therefore, we examined how dark personality traits and collective narcissism predict health behaviors directly and indirectly through beliefs about the virus.”
Hand-washing showed personal responsibility for transmission and also an understanding of embeddedness in a social network where contamination transferred from other individuals to them. This was an adaptive trait. Hoarding showed a self-focused save-myself response that greatly exacerbated the emergency creating scarcities that made more scarcities likely as fear increased and more hoarding behaviors were activated, snowballing the situation. They were therefore narcissistic and maladaptive, meaning, adapting to them ultimately would cause collapse in a way handwashing would not. Handwashing would actually resolve the situation by targeting the transmission over networks. Hoarding in no way addressed this, and analytically failed by mistaking resource scarcity with a “wealth” of adaptive behaviors that cannot be materially owned. Hoarding will not save them.
“Given that COVID-19 evokes threats to the self and the group, we were concerned with the role of person-focused and group-focused traits in prevention and health beliefs. Person-focused traits are relevant to the self, whereas group-focused traits are relevant to one's identity as a group member (Sedikides, Gaertner, Luke, O'Mara, & Gebauer, 2013). Also, measures of person-focused traits invite participants to report their opinions of themselves, whereas measures of group-focused traits invite participants to report their opinions of their group (Żemojtel-Piotrowska, Sawicki, & Jonason, 2020). Although there is a wide range of so-called dark traits to consider (Zeigler-Hill & Marcus, 2016), as a rule, these traits are manifestations of self-interests—individual or group; that is, the traits refer to maximizing one's own benefit or one's group benefit, even at the expense of others persons or groups.”
Collective narcissism led to maladaption by minimizing repeatedly again and again the potential danger and maximizing self-interest through behaviors like hoarding for a narcissistic group or highlighting a group not being given excessive priority.
“Agentic collective narcissism refers to strong identification with one's group, unrealistically positive beliefs about the group's potency in the agentic domain (e.g., achievement, competence, dominance), entitlement about the group, and grievance for lack of external recognition. Communal collective narcissism refers to a strong identification with one's ingroup, unrealistically positive beliefs about the ingroup's communality (e.g., friendliness, helpfulness, sacrifice), entitlement about the group's communal value, and grievances for lack of external recognition in the communal domain (Żemojtel-Piotrowska, Piotrowski, Sedikides, et al., 2020). Both collective and grandiose narcissism may be compensatory mechanisms for fragile self-esteem accompanied by a (hyper)sensitivity to threat (Golec de Zavala, 2018; Mollon, 1993). Given that the COVID-19 virus is a threat to people's physical health (Ahorsu et al., 2020), we expected person- and group-focused aspects of dark personality to be related to reactions toward the virus, leading to preventive and hoarding behaviors as manifestations of minimizing perceived danger and maximizing self-interest.”
Dark Triad individuals are more likely to be impulsive, competitive, and engage in risky behaviors, which are all risks to health.
“ Individuals characterized by the Dark Triad traits are likely to be impulsive (Jones & Paulhus, 2011) and competitive (Jones & Figueredo, 2013), as well as to engage in risky behaviors (Gott & Hetzel-Riggin, 2018)—proclivities that may adversely affect one's health.”
Rivalrous narcissism and psychopathy’s response to the Covid-19 pandemic led to impulsive, non-conformist, short-sighted, and risk tendencies that showed a failure to prevent and failure to even give prevention any validity which was supplemented by a maladaptive replacement behavior to adaptive prevention traits, namely hoarding once the emergency actually hit. Again, this causes the situation to snowball, so is maladaptive, and incentivizes more maladaptive traits.
“. In relation to the virus, those higher, for example, in rivalrous narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy (Factor 1), were less likely to comply with governmental restrictions geared toward reducing the spread of the virus in Poland (Zajenkowski et al., 2020). Therefore, because of the agentic (Jonason & Fletcher, 2018), impulsive (Jones & Paulhus, 2011), nonconformist (Jonason, Koehn, Bulyk, & Davis, 2020), short-sighted (Jonason et al., 2017), and risk-taking (Crysel, Crosier, & Webster, 2013) tendencies of those characterized by the Dark Triad traits, we hypothesized that they would (1) engage in limited prevention but (2) be likely to hoard supplies.”
Collective narcissistic groups rely on supporting each other as superior and need to feel another group is inferior. In the Polish study, this can be seen in marked racist behaviors of Polish groups on the East Coast. As integration in the area happened, this settled out, and now Polish, Italian, and other early immigrant groups mutually identify without many problems for the most part. However, before integration, hypersensitivity to threats and negative emotionality can be witnessed.
“Collective narcissism is about how exceptional someone feels their group is (in the agentic or communal domain) and how inferior they feel that other groups are (Golec de Zavala, 2018). This disposition translates to hypersensitivity to threats and proclivity for negative emotionality (Golec de Zavala et al., 2019; Golec de Zavala, Cichocka, & Bilewicz, 2013).”
Comically, having to adapt to Covid-19’s inarguable reality caused collective narcissists to fight national mandates, threatening everyone by creating superspreading events, as well as caused hoarding to not be “stripped of what they were due” by Covid-19. This shows maladaptive behavior because Covid-19 is not a group. This is similar to maladaption seen in Vladmir Putin’s bureau that sees being gay as something that is a result of liberal propaganda, while gayness can be seen in animals that do not have any verbal cognitions. This analytical mistake shows poor analyticity is itself maladaptation, because it will lead to a waste of resources hunting down something that occurs naturally in nature. Defiance of Covid-19 was a similar maladaptation.
“ Assuming that COVID-19 would act as a threat to one's sense of group superiority (Sternisko et al., 2020; Żemojtel-Piotrowska, Piotrowski, Sawicki, & Jonason, 2020), we hypothesized that it would spur positive associations between collective narcissism and hoarding, but not necessarily between collective narcissism and preventive behaviors. On the other hand, collective narcissists might adopt preventive measures, because they were encouraged to do so by their own government. Support for government could be a reaction to an external threat of the ingroup status quo (Henderson-King, Henderson-King, & Hathaway, 2009).”
Lack of remorse and rationalizing crime/wrongdoing were seen in the test to detect Dark Triad traits.
“We measured the Dark Triad traits (Wave 2) with the Polish translation (Czarna, Jonason, Dufner, & Kossowska, 2016) of the Dark Triad Dirty Dozen scale (Jonason & Webster, 2010). The scale consists of four items assessing individual differences in psychopathy (e.g., “I tend to lack remorse”), narcissism (e.g., “I tend to seek prestige or status”), and Machiavellianism (e.g., “I tend to manipulate others to get my way”). Participants indicated their agreement with each item (1 = strongly disagree, 5 = strongly agree). We averaged responses to create indices of each trait.”
Collective narcissism was measured as well.
“We measured agentic and communal collective narcissism (Wave 2) with the 9-item Agentic Collective Narcissism Scale (Golec de Zavala et al., 2009) and the 7-item Collective Communal Narcissism Inventory (Żemojtel-Piotrowska, Piotrowski, Sedikides, et al., 2020). Participants indicated their agreement (1 = definitely disagree, 7 = definitely agree) with statements for the former (e.g., “I wish other groups would more quickly recognize authority of my group”) and the latter (e.g., “My group is extraordinarily friendly toward other groups”). We removed one item (i.e., “If my group had more to say, the world would be a better place”) from the former to reduce redundancy and potential multicollinearity with an item from the latter (i.e., “My group will make the world a better place”). We averaged responses to create indices of each form of collective narcissism.”
Health belief and hoarding scales were also measured.
“To measure health beliefs about the COVID-19 virus (Wave 1), we modified (20 items only) the Health Belief scale (Champion, 1984) by substituting the name of the virus.
We created two ad hoc measures of individual differences in preventive behaviors and hoarding behaviors (Wave 1) regarding the virus (three items each). Participants indicated how likely they were (1 = definitely not, 4 = definitely yes) to have enacted preventive (i.e., “Decontaminating often touched places [e.g., phone, keys, and door-knobs]; Washing hands more often [e.g., after each return home]; Limiting leaving home without explicit necessity [e.g., to spend time with friends]”) and hoarding (i.e., “Stockpile bigger amounts of food [e.g., flour, milk, eggs, canned goods]; Stockpile more cleaning and disinfecting supplies [e.g., wipes, toilet paper, soap, spirit, etc.]; Stockpile of protective measures [e.g., gloves, masks]”) behaviors during the last week in relation to the coronavirus. We averaged responses to form indices of each type of behavior.
Participants high in collective narcissism were more likely to engage in hoarding.
participants high in collective narcissism were more likely to engage in hoarding.
Prevention was little to none in collective narcissists due to exceptionalism (“it won’t/can’t happen here”/”not here”) personal exceptionalism (“it won’t happen to me; maybe it will happen to you, but not to me”) and lower self-efficacy (“I’m not good at any of that, I’ll just go to the doctor for it.”)
Reluctance to engage in preventive behavior among those characterized by the Dark Triad traits was partially explained by their health beliefs about COVID-19, especially higher perceived susceptibility, higher perceived barriers, and lower sense of self-efficacy.
Hoarding looks like it may have been for self-protection; perceived higher susceptibility led to more hoarding; aka, they didn’t have faith in their abilities to adapt well and be resilient live and in a feedback loop with the environment in crisis. This may actually reflect self-knowledge of poor adaption/poor empathy skills by trying to minimize reliance on others that they know they’re not good with by taking a lot.
“Participants characterized by the Dark Triad traits may have engaged in hoarding partially for self-protection (Sedikides, 2012), as higher levels of perceived susceptibility were associated with more hoarding.”
Working memory also is a predictor of narcissism. Narcissists were more likely to be fatigued by lock ins and want it to be over with before the situation was satisfactorily resolved/the threat completely annihilated, showing it is maladaptive as it doesn’t actually solve the problem.
“Specifically, people may be more likely to engage in prevention and adhere to restrictions in the beginning of the pandemic than two months into the “lockdown”. Indeed, fatigue curves for adhering to the restrictions and engaging in prevention may be a function of dark personality traits. Specifically, people may be more likely to engage in prevention and adhere to restrictions in the beginning of the pandemic than two months into the “lockdown”. Indeed, fatigue curves for adhering to the restrictions and engaging in prevention may be a function of dark personality traits.”
Thwarting dark triad behaviors through cognitive intervention is key to an adaptive, vs. maladaptive, emergency response. This means avoiding hoarding and even actively preventing it when necessary, as it tends to snowball and is a maladaptive exacerbation of the situation, and also means encouraging engagement in prevention and encouraging taking prevention seriously and not thinking one doesn’t need prevention because of collective narcissistic beliefs that it “won’t happen to them, so they don’t need prevention”. (Again, maladaptive.)
. Such possibly problematic health beliefs, then, could be altered through interventions that would thwart those with dark personalities from some personal and interpersonal costs of the pandemic, encouraging engagement in prevention and the avoidance of hoarding.