I think this study gave me a deeper understanding of how narcissists view their own intelligence. We know of the stereotype that narcissists think they’re brilliant at everything, but it turns out that’s only true for one type of narcissist.
In this research, 264 people were studied and categorized narcissism to three: the grandiose type (agentic extraversion), the hostile manipulative type (antagonistic narcissism), and the vulnerable defensive type (neurotic narcissism). I guess what makes this unique from other studies was instead of just asking people to rate their general IQ, they tested how participants viewed their abilities across verbal, mathematical, artistic, and social intelligence domains.
What they found was striking, because only the grandiose narcissists showed the common pattern of thinking that they excelled at everything. I was caught off guard with the fact that the other two types of narcissists actually rated their social and emotional intelligence lower than average, while giving normal estimations of the other cognitive abilities.
The researchers noted that people with neurotic narcissism showed “a tendency of questioning their own abilities in recognizing and adequately distinguishing emotional or motivational states in themselves and other people.” In other words, the very narcissists we might consider most problematic actually demonstrate some self-awareness about their interpersonal shortcomings. This suggests that what we call “narcissistic overconfidence” might be far more selective than we realized.
I think this has significant implications for how we interpret self-reported intelligence measures, because someone’s confidence in their cognitive abilities might tell us more about their personality structure than their actual intellectual capacity.
The distinction between narcissism types is really important here. Agentic narcissists overestimate everything (classic Dunning-Kruger), but antagonistic and neurotic narcissists actually show surprising self-awareness about their social/emotional deficits. This challenges the simplistic “narcissists think they’re geniuses” stereotype. What’s interesting is that antagonistic narcissists rated personal intelligence lower they seem to know they’re not great with people, they just don’t care or see it as a problem. This suggests different narcissism profiles have totally different relationships with self-perception and reality.
The gender effects are worth noting too men consistently rated themselves higher on mathematical-logical intelligence regardless of narcissism level, which probably reflects cultural stereotypes more than actual ability. But the main takeaway is that self-estimated intelligence is as much about personality as actual cognitive ability. If someone rates themselves highly across all domains, that’s a red flag for agentic narcissism, not necessarily high IQ. This has practical implications: should we even trust self-reported intelligence in personality research, or is it just measuring confidence and narcissism?
