Narcissistic Celebrities

Article by Rebecca Skloot:

A new study shows that celebrities are more narcissistic than the general public.

You wouldn’t be alone if reading that made you think, Well, duh! Everyone knows that. But you’d be wrong. Until recently, no one had studied celebrities to determine whether they’re truly narcissistic. Why? Because celebrities are shielded by public-relations people and managers who reject requests for things like personality questionnaires. Unless you’re Drew Pinsky, the University of Southern California psychiatry professor and host of “Loveline,” a syndicated radio talk show.

Pinsky has celebrity guests on his show who talk about their latest projects while he answers questions from teenagers about love and sex. Over the years, during commercial breaks, he and his colleague Mark Young, a professor of sports and entertainment business at U.S.C., have surveyed 200 celebrities using the Narcissistic Personality Inventory, a widely respected questionnaire that measures narcissistic tendencies and ranks individuals on a scale of 1 to 40, with 40 being “extremely narcissistic.”

Pinsky and Young found that on average, celebrities scored 17.84 — about 17 percent higher than the general public — with females ranking significantly higher than males. Interestingly, celebrities with the most skill (musicians) were the least narcissistic; those with no skill (reality-show stars) were, as Pinsky says, “off the narcissism charts.”

When Pinsky and Young published their data, people said, Whoa, celebrities love themselves— what a shocker! But in fact, that’s not the case. “Narcissism is not about self love,” Pinsky says. “It’s a clinical trait that belies a deep sense of emptiness, low self-esteem, emotional detachment, self-loathing, extreme problems with intimacy.”

The way Pinsky sees it, celebrities have a huge influence on us, and it’s important to know whom we’re modeling ourselves after. Young agrees: “We’ve all heard stories of celebrities in disastrous relationships; we watch them lie, cheat and get away with it. Drew and I just hope that people — especially kids — won’t try to emulate that behavior if they know that some of those folks may actually have an underlying disorder making them behave like that.”

Rebecca Skloot