A Study On The Relationship Between Narcissism And Altruism In Social Comparison

Narcissism has a complex personality structure,although there have been a lot of research on narcissism,but there is no strict unified operational definition of narcissism.When people talk about narcissism,they think about narcissists' inflated self-concepts and inflated views of themselves.They seek attention and the pursuit of supreme power and status,which reflects that narcissists are keen to compare themselves with others.In their school days,they expect good grades and rankings;after work,they crave high salary and high salary,and seek for the sense of superiority they need.However,although narcissists have a positive self-concept and a high level of self-esteem,such high self-esteem is fragile.Narcissists need to constantly maintain a high level of self-esteem by using some self-enhancement strategies to maintain a good self-evaluation.In the process of social comparison,people will re-evaluate themselves,refresh their understanding of themselves and then find their relative position.Social comparison can be divided into three directions: upward comparison,parallel comparison and downward comparison.Upward comparison is to compare with others who are better than us.In this process,we will see our own shortcomings and shortcomings,and even feel inferior.A downward comparison is a comparison with someone who is in a worse situation than you.This is when an individual experiences a positive self-evaluation and improves their self-esteem.Narcissists' self-esteem is fragile,and they will adopt a series of strategies to protect themselves from the threat of social comparison,so as to avoid the decrease of self-evaluation.Altruistic behavior is a behavior with high social approval,through which individuals can get more attention and win people's respect.In some cases,altruistic behavior will become a means for narcissists to maintain their fragile self-esteem and enhance themselves.Three experiments were conducted to investigate the effects of social comparison on altruistic behaviors of narcissists and the underlying mechanism.The narcissistic level of college students was measured by the narcissistic personality scale distributed to them,and the subjects with different narcissistic levels were screened out by the score of the scale.In the first experiment,participants completed implicit association test to explore the altruistic behavior characteristics of participants with different levels of narcissism.In experiment 2,the social comparison task was added before the implicit association test to explore the effect of social comparison on the altruistic behaviors of participants with different levels of narcissism.On the basis of experiment 2,experiment 3 studied the internal mechanism of the influence on the altruistic behavior of the narcissistic group in the upward social comparison context.The study concluded with the following conclusions:(1)All participants showed IAT effect,and the effect value of the narcissistic group was significantly smaller than that of the non-narcissistic group.(2)Participants in the narcissistic group were significantly affected by social comparison,especially upward social comparison;The social comparison situation had no significant effect on the non-narcissistic group.(3)The effect of upward social comparison on altruistic behaviors of narcissistic individuals was mediated by the self-esteem of narcissistic individuals.