Narcissism – the pursuit of gratification from vanity or egotistic admiration of one’s own attributes, is on the rise, and it has been for some time.
And that’s not just an observation of the rate of selfies and Facebook posts about the great things happening to us. It is a serious observation from the average score of people taking the Narcissistic Personality Inventory (NPI) test.
It is an interesting test to take, for example on this NPI link, at a personal level.
An interesting statistics is shared by the test group, which is the average narcissism score. It increases regularly such as in this study of US undergraduates.
As we can see, this observation of an increase in narcissism goes back to at least the 1990s. While the series stops in 2005, practical observation would suggest this has continued until now.
I believe this is quite an important observation as it reveals quite an important feature of our societies which has probably been accelerated by the availability of social networks and the possibility to filter out one’s life to keep only the exciting part.
So, how narcissistic are you?
