A Study Of The Relationship Between Narcissism And Prosocial Behavior In A Social Context

Narcissism is a complex variable with affection and motivation. Narcissists have positive self-concept and high self-esteem but fragile to context, and they need to self-enhance through external affirmation such as social comparison. Recent studies found narcissists interest in "getting ahead" implies a strong orientation toward social comparisons, high intelligence implies intellectual superiority over others, while being successful implies that one has attained a higher social rank than others. Social comparison is a process in which individuals know and evaluate themselves by comparing with others on their character, ability, advantages and disadvantages. Setting social comparison situation via experiment can incur that social comparison effects on social cognition and behavior. Previous studies have shown that social comparison can affect the pro-social behavior of individuals (Klein,2003; Frey & Meier,2004; Riyanto & Zhang,2013). Above all, as narcissists, how does social comparison effect the pro-social behaviors and what is the mechanism?This study include three parts. Under the condition of social comparison, the Implicit Association Test were applied to examined the relationships between narcissism and implicit altruism. In study 1, Adopting split-half methods, participants scoring above the average were identified as narcissists and those below as non-narcissists. Between-subject design was used to investigate the tendency of implicit altruism for two groups. Narcissists were hypothesized to demonstrate weaker tendencies of implicit altruism compared to non-narcissists. In study 2, we manipulated social comparison by giving false intelligence test feedback, the three kinds of experimental conditions are upward comparison, the downward comparison, and the control conditions. A 2 (narcissism:narcissists vs. non-narcissists) x 2 (social comparison:upward group, downward group, control group) design was applied, the 220 participants were randomly assigned to the three experimental conditions. The experimental task is Implicit Association Test, to explore the influence of social comparison context on implicit altruism behaviors. In study 3,the number of subjects are 186. we use the Self Concept Scale to measure the changes of participants' self-concept under the different ways of social comparison, which aimed to reveal the internal mechanism of narcissists' implicit altruism with different comparison ways.The experiment results show that:(1) Although implicit altruistic tendencies are universal, but relative to the non-narcissistic group, the implicit pro-social orientation in narcissism group performance is weaker. (2) Contexts of social comparison had great influence on implicit altruism behaviors of narcissists. Compared to the downward comparison and control conditions, Participants in the upward comparison condition had more implicit altruistic behaviors. However, The narcissists' performance tends to be stable, that is there was no significant differences among three groups. (3) Self-concept was served as intermediary between social comparison and implicit altruism of narcissists. In the condition of upward comparison, self-concept of narcissists decreased, which inversely increased their pro-social behaviors; nevertheless, the condition of downward comparison enhanced inflation of narcissists'self-concept, which lead to less pro-social behaviors. The mechanism had no effect on non-narcissists.The present study examined the relationships between narcissism and implicit altruism. It not only increased understanding of narcissistic personality, but also enriched studies on pro-social behaviors of narcissists. With the effect of affection and motivation, the pro-social behaviors of narcissists were increased when they compared upward in order to safeguard their frustrated self-esteem. The results suggest possible pathways to practical improvement narcissists' low pro-social behaviors.