Stuff You Should Know - Narcissism: But what about me?

Episode Date: December 19, 2017

This week Josh and Chuck dive into the world of narcissism, one of the most perplexing and disturbing disorders humans can have. Learn all you ever cared to know about people who largely are centered on the self, lack empathy and don't understand what the problem is with that behavior. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

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Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Hey, before we get started, everyone, this is Chuck, and I am going to be doing my first ever Facebook Live tomorrow at 3 p.m. Eastern. I'm very excited about this. I'm gonna be talking about Movie Crush.

So if you're a fan of that show, come by, talk to me. If you got stuff you should know questions, come by, talk to me. Tomorrow, Wednesday afternoon, 3 p.m. Eastern, that's noon Pacific. I'm gonna be live in front of your faces, so come one, come all. Can't wait to talk to everybody.

Welcome to Stuff You Should Know from HowStuffWorks.com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, and there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant, and Noel is with us again today. No, guest producer, no. That's right. So this, Chuck, is stuff you should know.

I'm gonna start whispering every few lines. You know what we should do. Uh, what? We, so everybody knows, a lot of people know. Some people know. A lot of people listen to stuff you should know to fall asleep. Yeah.

Well, actually, they're probably not asleep yet. We should wait a few minutes to do this. Oh, you're gonna say start screaming every 10 minutes or something? No, nothing like that. We'll just start telling them things in their sleep to tell other people later, like subliminal stuff. Oh, like, subscribe to Movie Crush.

Yeah, that's a good one. Send us a dollar. Yeah, why not make it two? They have $2 bills, you know. Yeah. So, all right, we'll do that later. We'll insert a Movie Crush subliminal message later for the people who are sleeping.

Did you ever get $2 bills as gifts from wacky relatives? Yep. What is it with that? They'd hand you that card with a $2 bill and their flapping dick you would roll up to their chair. Yeah, and they'd say, here's something that you shouldn't spend. Right.

Like, great, thanks for nothing. Yeah, I know, it was weird. They're almost like works of art, but novelties. Like X-ray specs or something like that. Yeah, we should do a stuff you should know short episode on the $2 bill. Do we have those? No.

Okay, would that be the inaugural one? Yeah, S-Y-S-K shorts. Oh, okay. Like six minute episodes, like the old days. Okay, we'll get back to that. It'll save us a lot of time every week if we do those. Or maybe, yeah, we should just do those. And not the deep dives that we've become known for

over the past 10 years. Sure, and kiss our careers, goodbye. Goodbye, careers, thank you for coming. So, narcissism. Oh, let's get to it, let's get serious. How do you feel about all this? So, anytime, Chuck, when you and I are researching one of these things, separately, of course.

But when we're researching these, I'm always going like the mental health ones. I'm always like, is this me? Is this describing me? And sometimes they do, you know? And this one is no exception. There are certainly some parts to it, but as we'll see later, I fall more toward one end

of the spectrum than another. But either way, I would not say that I'm clinical in any sense of the word as a narcissist. I'm pretty sure. Yeah. Yeah, how about you? Did you sit there and think about me while you were researching this too?

It sounds like a narcissistic statement. No, I didn't think about myself that that's what you were really asking. It was. Because I think I'm probably the opposite of a narcissist. So you just walk around thinking like, I'm just not good enough all the time? No, because as we will learn, many narcissists at their core

think that deep down. Well, yeah, that's actually supposed to be one of the defining traits of narcissism, which is kind of surprising for people who don't know about it. Because when you think narcissists, you think just a complete conceded jackass who's just totally self-involved and couldn't care less about you and your family and the fact

that you've got a whole being worn in the one sweater you own. They don't care about that. They just want to push you around and take your pocket change. That's a narcissist and a bully, I guess, too. Yeah, I have had a lot of experience with narcissists in my life, though, so I have a lot to say about it. Probably won't say much of it because of protecting the innocent. You could use pseudonyms.

Like, I know this narcissist. I've worked with him for a decade. His name is Squash Park. That would work. I think that would protect people. Yeah, I think my definition of narcissism after reading this, especially, too, it's probably less clinical and more experiential for me,

which is basically just a general singular point of view that is only from that person's eyeballs. Like, an inability to see anything from anyone else's point of view other than their own, and not even recognizing that that's happening. Well, yeah, I think that's kind of part of it, too, is you're so sure you're right and just so confident in your own answers and thoughts

and beliefs that it would be basically impossible to see anyone else's perspective. So whatever the opposite, I have a clinical problem with putting myself in others' places too much. To a debilitating degree, probably. Yeah. Am I putting that person out? Oh my gosh, did I get in that person's way?

Did I do something to upset someone? I wonder if that compliment I gave the checkout clerk at the grocery store was nice enough. Is that what you do? No. Not really. No, I think you're just fairly emotionally stable and your personality's pretty stable, too.

I don't think you have a lot to worry about either way. Well, maybe not in that small realm of my life, but... No, I mean, personality-wise, you've got a pretty good, solid personality, Chuck. I appreciate that. Yeah, man. And you know one of the things that stuck out to me when I was researching this is,

and this is pretty much a persistent theme with psychology, is psychology is the study of how you're failing to fit into society in a good way, you know? Sure. Like that's the whole point of it, because we've assigned psychology this role of determining what's normal, who's normal, who's not, and then hopefully treating the people who aren't normal.

But really, that definition of normalcy comes down to we all live in society and either you fit in pretty well or you don't fit in and there's a spectrum in between. And that's what psychology does, is look at all the different ways people have trouble fitting in in a peaceful, quiet, socially acceptable manner. And this is one of them.

This is one of the most prominent ones. And one of the reasons it is so prominent is because narcissism, the word itself, has almost lost entirely its clinical meaning because it's been so thoroughly hijacked by pop culture, which has been fostered, I have to say, by some psychologists in the field who've used pop culture to point to the idea that narcissism is on the rise

or whatever. So it's almost just completely lost its meaning. And there's a lot of questions about how meaningful is a diagnosis of narcissism these days. It seems like there is still some agreement that there is what you would consider a personality disorder called narcissistic personality disorder and that it's exceedingly rare.

I saw something like 200,000 people in the United States probably have it. That's really rare. But that there is possibly such a thing as a trait that a person can have, which you would call narcissism, which if you're saying, oh, that person's so narcissistic, that's what you would be referring to. And you could conceivably call that a subclinical level

of narcissism, but that's increasingly coming into greater and greater question. Yeah, like to me, I think it fully exists on a spectrum. And we'll get to all this because other people feel like scientists feel like it does as well. But that's for later in the episode. Well, let's do something really radically weird. And let's actually start by defining narcissism.

Actually, let's do something even weirder, Chuck. Let's start with a nice little dollop of mythology. Okay. You want to? Sure, the story of Narcissus, which you're laughing at. Yeah, it's like tattoo. So what do you say? Narcissus.

Oh, interesting. I have, you're not the first person to say it like that though. I have heard Narcissus and I think it's usually British people who say it like that. Oh, see, I might be getting it from the Indigo Girl song. Did that, I don't remember that one. Which one?

Can you sing a little bit? Hammer and a Nail, I think? Yes. I don't know the Narcissus. There's a line where they say, I look a lot like Narcissus. Yeah, that's probably where you got it then. I mean, I'm sure that's where I got it.

And probably had never heard anyone say it before Emily Sailors. Man, that's a good song. Sailors? I don't know, Sailors. All right, so Narcissus in the myth was a, apparently he was a boy that was so beautiful and so good looking.

And this is how these myths go. They're always kind of, you know, little hokey. Like this is the child that is so good looking that they will just destroy their lives in the world with their good looks. Sure. And so a prophet named Thereseus. Does that sound right?

Sure. Okay. Yeah, I have no issues with that. All right, said to the parents, you better make sure this kid, Narcissus, never sees himself, because this is gonna be big trouble. And so they said- If you think he's bad now, wait until he sees himself.

So the parents are like, all right, I got you. No mirrors in the house, no shiny brass baubles, no stainless steel refrigerator, no windows, no nothing in our house that's reflective, because we gotta keep our son from seeing himself. Yeah. And so I guess they were pretty successful for a while, for basically the kid's whole life.

And as Narcissus, or Narcissus, man, you got me going now, as he grew older, he was clearly aware of his looks, because he would, anybody who fell for him, he'd be like, yeah, you're great, but you're not good enough for me. I'm sorry. Take off, hoser was his famous line.

And so all the hosers would take off and cry and cry and cry. And so he knew he was good looking, but he still hadn't seen himself. And one of the hosers that he told to take off was a, I think a wood nymph, right? Sure. Wasn't she, or she was some sort of,

yeah, she was a nymph. Oh yeah. Named Echo. Uh-huh. And Echo was just, had it about as bad for Narcissus as a nymph could possibly have it for a good looking boy. And she said, I'm so sad, I'm just going to just lie here and cry.

And she cried and cried and cried so much so, that she became nothing more than her own voice, which you can still hear if you shout into the mountains. That's where the Echo comes from. So he went on along this path, kind of leaving a trail of ladies in his wake, helplessly heartbroken, until finally,

and he should have known this was coming because her name of this goddess was Nemesis. So he should have been steered clear there, but he finally wronged Nemesis and broke her heart. And she was like, well, you know what? My name's Nemesis for a reason. And I'm gonna punish you, sir. Here, walk with me to this pool

and look down upon yourself. Or maybe you're a little bit thirsty. So he went down to get some water and he was like, hey, look at that fella. And he was in love with himself. Yeah, he fell head over heels in love with himself. But there's a couple of problems with this. This whole story would have gone totally different.

Had Narcissus been like, I'm in love with myself. I'm going to take that self-love and turn it into something really great and share that with the world. It's gonna be self-confidence and productivity. I'm gonna fit into society just perfectly, but that's not what happened because it was a superficial love. He was in love with how he looked, right?

The problem with that is, is he could never have himself. It takes a mate, another person. It's another big thing in society too, right? You got to couple up, right? So he was doomed forever to have an unrequited love for himself. And so since the closest he could get was his reflection, he just stayed by that pool forever and ever and ever.

Yeah, looking at himself. And turned into a flower, the Narcissus flower. Yeah, a junk wheel flower. Yeah, they're very pretty. It's like a daffodil, a nice daffodil. Yeah. So that's the story of where it came from. And well, now we should define it

because you promised that. So that story is pretty old. I think it's Greek at least, if not maybe even older than that. But in the 19th century, the Victorians realized that this is a pretty good allegory for a certain type of person. And these type of people today,

now I guess the classical definition of a narcissist or a clinical narcissist is basically somebody who's sense of self-importance and sense of entitlement that arises from that sense of self-importance is so great and so ridiculously over-exaggerated. And so in a lot of ways, unfounded, that it leads to a lot of harm in their life.

They have a lot of trouble. It's usually pretty easy for them to make new friendships, but they don't last very long. They have trouble accepting criticism. They may lash out, they may be aggressive. They're usually fairly extroverted. And again, this is the classical clinical criteria for a narcissist.

And they apparently, like you said before, are harboring at their base a real lack of genuine self-esteem or a real lack of genuine self-love. And that lack is so deep and so profound that it's reflected conversely on the outside as just utter and complete arrogance and disregard for other people's feelings.

Yes. That is the classical definition or criteria for a narcissist. But as we'll learn, there's another, there's actually two sides to that same narcissism coin. Yes. So let's go back to some more of the history there. Like you said, the Victorians, they're all under this, you know,

kind of burgeoning psychoanalysis labeling of things. And in the late 1890s, there was a sexologist named Havlock Ellis. And I really, by the way, I hated all these little parenthetical. Oh, man. In this article on how stuff works, it's these little parenthetical asides.

Little judgments. That this author wrote like Havlock Ellis, that's his real name. Like Havlock Ellis, that's a, I mean, Havlock is an interesting name, but it's not like unbelievable anymore. I know. Can you believe this folks?

He's bugged me. He's not normal. It gets worse. I'll point out all three. Thank you, buddy. I'm glad, I'm applauding for you then. Well, what bugs you bugs me most likely. You know what's great is that's absolutely true.

Like when I'm researching, I can, that's why I knew you were thinking of me when researching narcissism because I was thinking of myself too. So Havlock Ellis said that if you masturbate a lot then you're sort of a narcissist or narcissists like. Yeah, and you're making the saints cry. That's right.

And then others came along who said, yeah, this is a thing in the early 1900s, like a 1911, there was another analyst named Otto Rank who said, and no snarky comment about that name, put out a paper that he really kind of dug into narcissism and went beyond the just sexual nature of Havlock Ellis and said this is just a more generalized definition of someone who is sort of self-obsessed.

Right, right. So he kind of, yeah, he took it into a bit of a condition, a personality type, you could say, I think is what he was originally going for. A little closer to that for sure, yeah. We should do, I don't know if Havlock Ellis had anything to do with it, but you know, so like Graham crackers were invented

to prevent people from masturbating so much. How does that work? It was just totally made up, but it was this part of like that whole road to Wellville kind of thing. Did you ever see that movie with Anthony Hopkins? I know the movie, I never saw it. Same here, I never saw it either.

We should watch it together. But we should also do a whole podcast on that whole, that late 19th century like nutrition for like life improvement, okay? We're gonna do that episode one day. So after Havlock Ellis and auto rank, there was, get this guy's name, Sigmund Freud. He comes along after rank.

And I don't think that was the first time I feel like I've seen their names together before in plenty of other ways. At the very least they were contemporaries because three years after rank said, you know what, I think this narcissism thing goes beyond people who engage in self abuse a little too often. Freud came along and he hit the nail on the head.

As I think Freud's gonna be like a religious icon in three or five or a thousand years. Oh yeah? I really think so. I think this guy really got a lot of stuff right in a lot of ways that he stopped getting credit for. And I think the reason why is this, Chuck, he is pigeonholed into the compartment of psychology.

Where I think he was a psychoanalyst, he was a psychologist. But I think more than anything, he was one of the great thinkers who's ever lived. And I think the idea that you're approaching everything at him or everything he's ever said from the idea that this is a psychologist saying this rather than this is a great thinker

who can think or talk about anything has said. It kind of makes people miss the mark a little bit on him. This is my prediction. If he had been noted more for his philosophy than his psychology then. I think he'd have a lot more credibility in the world. Well, he came along in terms of narcissism said, you know what, I think not only is it

psychosexual in nature, but I think everybody goes through this phase at some point. But you are only a true narcissist if you don't regress past that phase basically. Yep, and that's kind of still today. So that was what 1914 when he came up with that theory. That's basically still pretty well established so much so that it's not even attributed to Freud anymore.

It's just like, yeah, that's human nature. You, as you age, you enter into a period of self-love that you would basically call a narcissistic phase. And then as you get a little older and mellow out, you start to turn your love toward other people in the world in general. And that's part of a natural personality development. Yeah, but it still, it took a psychoanalyst name,

Robert Velta, who finally said this is an actual personality type that we should study. And then William Wilhelm, excuse me, a Wilhelm Reich, parenthetical, three Austrians in a row. With an exclamation point. So he came along and said that, well, first of all, narcissists are almost always men. And the thinking on that is not true anymore,

although I still think usually men are thought of to be narcissists. Yeah, it's typically considered a male-dominated condition, right? Yeah, and he basically, he kind of put in words that link between masculinity and this narcissistic aggression that kind of can come along with being a narcissist. Right, he said it's dudes.

That was his big contribution. So then along came a woman, a German psychoanalyst named Karen Horney, go ahead. Parenthetical, finally a woman, and yes, that's her real name too. Okay, thank you Chuck. And in 1939, Karen Horney, should we say the parenthetical every time we say her name?

No. No, that's probably a bad idea. So Karen Horney came along in 1939, and she's like, all right, everybody shut up, I've got this figured out. This article misses it. So she had this idea that people have insecurities and there are different personality types

that deal with their insecurities. And with the expansive personality type, there were three subtypes that dealt with their insecurities. And one of those was the narcissist. So narcissism was one way that some people deal with their insecurities according to her. So she kind of, I guess her big contribution to it was

to point out that narcissism is a defense mechanism. Right. That was, which is a pretty significant breakthrough. It went from, it's people who masturbate too much too. Actually, it's mostly guys. And no, it's just a development stage too. Wait a minute, wait a minute. This is how some people reflexively deal with the fact

that they don't feel like they measure up deep down inside, which is kind of a mind blowing thing to do, especially if you're not aware of it. Like it's not like something happens to you when you're a kid and you go, you know what, when I grow up, I'm going to remember all this. But the way I'm going to deal with it is to be totally arrogant and pretend like I think

that I'm the greatest thing that ever happened. You just watch. Now I'm going to wait 12, 15 years and let the clock start ticking now. Yeah. So that was late 1930s. And then the next big breakthrough came in 1960 with Annie Reich, who was Phil Helm's wife, as this pointed out parenthetically.

Actually, that one's sort of legit. Yes, sure. Although he could have just used comments. Sure. You know, all these parentheses are driving me nuts. Yeah, they are. But this was a big breakthrough because she says, you know what, not only are people very vulnerable

who are narcissists, but I think it comes, that vulnerability might come from traumatic experience that they suffered when they were younger. Yeah. In the original source. That's still like kind of a thought about thing, not necessarily a trauma, but a lot of psychologists point to parents as potentially

the source for it, which we'll talk more about later. Yeah, and she also had the idea that narcissists, there is no sort of middle ground. They can't suffer ambiguity. And it's basically, I'm either totally successful or I'm a big failure. Right, which means that they can't handle criticism, which is a huge hallmark of the narcissistic

personality disorder, right? So there's another guy who didn't make it in this article, but made a huge contribution, actually two of them. One was Henry Murray. And back in 1938, he noticed that there was something that he termed a covert narcissist, where most people, when you think of a narcissist, you think overt narcissists,

like people who are just completely, obviously publicly in love with themselves. Yeah. But Henry Murray said, no, there's another type I've noticed. I'm gonna call them covert narcissists. And they share in common with overt narcissists, this conceit and arrogance, and they value their own needs

over other people's needs. So at their core, they are narcissistic. But the way that their narcissism plays out publicly is basically the opposite of an overt narcissist. Rather than being brash and self-assured and confident and cocky, they're actually quiet. They're introverted. All of their psychodrama plays out inside

and they become anxious. They're very vulnerable. They get very defensive. And then later on in the 90s, again, Paul Wink reclassified covert and overt into grandiosity, exhibitionism, and then vulnerability sensitivity. And the vulnerability sensitivity type of narcissists

is basically, they're entitled, they feel entitled, but they're also very bitter, right? Yeah, it's a lot of anxiety, bitterness, defensive, like you said before, introverted. And then one of the keys here, I think, is delusions of persecution, which can also be tied into paranoia. So everyone's out to get me.

They're coming after me. Why is it always me? That kind of line of thinking. So it's like constant, complete absorption in the self, but rather than absorption in thinking about how awesome you are, you're thinking about how the world's against you. But ultimately, the two things that they share,

that the types share in common, is that it all boils down to them. It's always about them, one way or another. Yeah, for sure. And that was incredibly insightful, I think, when you sent that one over. Yeah, thank you, buddy. I found that article.

You did? Yeah, and then finally, finally, in 1968, well, actually in 1961, a man named John Nimaia, finally coined the term narcissistic character disorder. And then finally, in 1968, Heinz Kohut described it as narcissistic personality disorder. And then it would be another 12 years before it would finally make it into the DSM,

as an actual diagnosed diagnostic description. Right, I think that 1980, yeah, a 1980 edition of the DSM3, right? Yeah. Okay, and Chuck, get this, man, we are like 27 minutes in to this episode. We're about to take our first ad break. That's a new record.

Yeah, so we'll be right back. We're gonna talk about me while you guys listen to these ads, but you can think about me. Somewhat not. All right. You're gonna go to Boston to see what's gonna happen. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and

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Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts, okay, man. So you said that it finally made it into the DSM in 1980, and it is a specified personality disorder. One of, I don't remember how many there are, but, um, in the DSM, this last go round, which was 2011, I think, for the DSM-5, um, do you remember all the press that got when the, when they were putting the DSM, the actual, um, term for it is Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the American Psychological Association's Bible, basically,

right? Yes. Where every psychologist and psychiatrist in all the land has this thing, and they're going through this saying, oh, this person has this, this, and this, so they actually qualify for this, so I can bill insurance for this and prescribe medication for this, and it's all legit. Like they, this is what the DSM does. It's the Bible for psychologists.

And one of, there was a huge struggle, um, in about 2010, 2011, between people who said, dude, these personality disorders are too, they're too strict. Yeah. And you either have it or you don't, and people, especially in terms of personality, just don't exist like that. We exist on spectrums. There's different dimensions, and we've talked about it before, I think, in the personality inventory episode, but the, the, the viewpoint that enjoys the widest appreciation these

days in the psychology community is the big five traits, the ocean or canoe traits, like openness or, um, openness to new experiences or, uh, extroversion, these kind of things. And, and when you take these different personality traits, you get a, a clearer picture of people, and you can also take those traits and basically apply them to dysfunction of personality. And you can say, well, you've got these dysfunctions and we need to work on this rather than you've got these five dysfunctions, which means you automatically qualify for narcissistic personality disorder. And narcissistic personality disorder and narcissism almost didn't make it into the DSM

five, but the people who were struggling for the big five traits to take over lost the battle and, and it stayed the same just the way it's been since 1980. And we'll, we'll talk about it more later, but there's a lot of, um, questions about whether it's legitimate, but the criteria, if you'll allow me, Chuck, the DSM's criteria for narcissistic personality disorder are these, you would have to have a grandiose sense of self-importance. It's pretty straightforward. You're preoccupied with fantasies of unlimited success, power, brilliance, beauty, or ideal

love. What else? You got that? Yes. Uh, number three believes that he or she is special and unique and can only be understood by or should associate with other special people. Yeah. Right.

Um, this is kind of like a narcissist spurring all the hosers, right? Right. Um, you require excessive admiration, right? Yeah. Um, which means that you, uh, you want compliments, you fish for compliments and flattery really gets you places with a narcissist too. Yeah. Uh, you have a high sense of entitlement, um, you're interpersonally exploitive.

This is a big one. Number seven, you lack empathy, either you're not able to or you, uh, or you're not willing to. Right. Um, and then you're often envious of others or you think that other people are envious of you. Again, this all kind of reverts back to you thinking about how it's always about you and that other people are walking around thinking about you at any given point in time.

Right. Uh, and then finally, uh, well, you're arrogant and you're kind of a jerk, right? And there you go. You put it together and that's the, that's the narcissist. And I think maybe five of nine qualify for a, uh, a definitive narcissistic personality disorder, um, diagnosis. Yeah. And the, and, uh, what makes a person a narcissist is sort of, uh, a conundrum at this point.

Uh, it's one of those things where, and this article kind of points it out, uh, in a good way where nature and nurture are so mixed up, um, that we don't really know what, uh, where, what can make someone a narcissist, um, certainly probably, or almost assuredly, it's a little bit of both, um, probably like most things, but, um, you could have parents that are, and especially nowadays, I know with, uh, parenting is, is like your child is the, the unique snowflake and you're the most special person on the planet and you are the most perfect little angel, uh, kind of feeding a child that as they grow up, um, which is a more recent parenting technique.

Yes. You get this, man. I read an article called how the self-esteem craze took over America. Yeah. Um, I posted it, you know, on my website, are you serious, clark.com, um, that I do reading lists, which is just like cool articles that I've read and it's on there, but they, they traced us back to one book that came out in 1991 called the lovable's in the kingdom of self-esteem.

Oh yeah. It's like a children's book and they, they said that like this was the source. This thing took off, ended up in like basically classroom curriculum and it raised this whole generation to have, um, more self-esteem than any other generation has been raised on before. Yeah. Not to knock self-esteem though. No, not at all. I think, um, I think though there is a general thought among some people that it has crossed

the line between self-esteem and, uh, entitlement. Yeah, there you go. So that, I mean, and that is a huge debate because a lot of people on the other side say, um, actually you're just being a crotchety old person who's aging and losing touch with what, you know, the world is doing these days. Um, yeah, I think that's, that's just fascinating to me, but we'll talk more about that later. But the parents are widely implicated, right? As possibly the source of this.

Yeah. For sure. I mean, she's a swinge, she's one of the champions of, um, of narcissism. She co-wrote a book with another researcher from the University of Georgia named W. Keith Campbell and it was called The Narcissism Epidemic. Yeah. Which became more than just a book title. It was basically a term that made the rounds from 2008 to even today you can find it.

It seems to have hit the high water mark back around 2010, 11, 12 maybe. Yeah. But they, they created this avalanche of discussion and press and talk and Gene Twinge, one of the, one of her hallmarks is to find support for her theory outside of the lab and more in pop culture. So one of the ways that she's, she's suggested that her theory is right that narcissism is indeed on the rise among millennials is that, um, children are given much less common names than they were before.

Yeah. I thought that was interesting. That whole thing where you name your kid, uh, Apple Martini, and you're, you're the only one in the world named Apple Martini. There's an Apple Teenie in my class, but I'm Apple Martini. Right. Uh, that is what a special, um, special little child you are. Right.

There shall be no other Apple Martini. Yeah. I think the stat they came up with was that in, um, the 1880s, 40% of boys received one of the 10 most common names today, fewer than 10% do you? Yeah. I mean, I thought that was a little hanky to say, well, in the 1880s, everyone was named Jack and John and William. Right.

It's just completely, it's just, uh, that's anecdotal evidence. Yeah. Basically that's trivia. That's not science. That's a trivia question. Totally. Totally. Is what it is.

The, and that's part of the problem with all that. Um, the idea that you can label an entire generation as narcissists by saying narcissism is on the rise. And then that in turn explains selfies and Facebook to the older people that it's actually a deficiency that these kids have. It's not me getting older. It's the kids. Right.

And now it's being proven by science. That's created this whole huge national conversation that's definitely taken narcissism very, very far out of, um, out of the research realm and into just complete armchair pop psychology. Well, here's some more pop psychology for you from me. Okay. Because I see, well, I don't know. I'm not going to make any judgment on today's, uh, on millennials and how narcissistic they

are. But I think that's, that's fair. But I have seen narcissism, rampant narcissism in our parents' generation. Oh yeah. Yeah. Yeah. The whole, um, uh, what, what, what was that generation? Hmm.

I guess baby boomers. Yeah. That's right. The baby boomers. They were just special in every single way, shape or form. Remember? Yeah. But that's the thing.

Like, uh, I have, I have seen it firsthand, um, with, with that generation where, but it's, it's not like, oh, I'm into selfies and stuff like that. Like it manifests itself in a completely different way or I'll, uh, I'll get on the phone with my kid and talk for 45 minutes about myself without once ever asking how they're doing. You know? So, so we should say here, you know, this is the, we're doing the same thing to that older generation though, that they're doing to younger generations too. Right.

You know? So maybe the point is narcissism isn't on the rise or on the decline at all. It's just always been there for a certain amount of people. Well there is a, yes, yes. There's a lot of evidence that that is absolutely true, Chuck. Like for example, there's, there was a really large study, like 37,000 something people which were apparently a pretty good representation of American adults. Right?

Yeah. So it's a, it's a good study population and they asked them to self report the instances of narcissism that they'd had throughout their life and they basically scored whether these people had experienced any basically bouts of narcissistic personality disorder or some sort of clinical narcissism, right? And they found that the younger you were, the more prone you were to have reported being narcissistic. And so a lot of people point to that and say, see, it's on the rise with the younger generation.

The older generation wasn't like that. And the other people who are critics of that say, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. When you get older, one of the hallmarks of getting older is completely forgetting all the stuff you went through to get to that point in your life. Yeah. Or how you are currently. Right. That's another way to put it too.

So there was a, there's a big problem with the idea of just having people self report whether they were narcissistic back in their lives. But people who do say, okay, even if that was legitimate, they're forgetting, people are forgetting that everybody goes through a narcissistic phase in their life. And that, yes, if you, if you go younger and you start asking people about it while they're in their narcissistic phase, they're going to be more likely to report it than people who have forgotten because their narcissistic phase was decades ago. Right.

Or the notion, and we'll get into the treatment a little bit more with, with seeing a psychologist or a therapist, but one of the hallmarks of a narcissist is to go to a therapist for a little while, maybe for depression or something else, which can be co-morbid. And they dig down and get to the root of it. And they're like, actually you're a narcissist and that's where all this stuff's coming from. Right. And that's when the narcissist goes, this is nuts.

I'm out of here. Like I'm not going to continue my therapy. You don't know what you're talking about. Right. Which is a huge problem. Apparently, if you are a narcissist and you do, you are one of the very, very few that end up in therapy. You're there for some other reason.

You're not like, oh, I'm a narcissist. I need help. I'm like, what's this weird anxiety I've got dealing with all the time or why am I depressed or why am I flying off the handle at work and HR sent me here? So they will get to therapy, but even the ones that do get there apparently tend to wash out pretty quickly because part and parcel with therapy is accepting criticism or other perspectives that you may have some things to work on. And once you start hitting that, that segment of therapy, the narcissist is probably going

to say, you're an idiot and I'm out of here. I can't be associating with you. You went to Yale, not Harvard. Right. And like you said, surprising, it's surprising if they're in there to begin with because part of being a narcissist is on one hand or at least in one kind of narcissist is, I got no problems. Why do I need to go to a therapist?

Everything's great. I don't have to crap with anyone thinks about me. Right. It's all good, bro. Right. So there's just some inherent problems with treating narcissism. I read a really interesting article in the Harvard Business Review and it was basically advice to mentors about how to mentor a narcissist and it did a really good job of explaining

like some of the problems that you will have at work being a narcissist. Like on the one hand, and apparently studies have found that narcissists tend to congregate or aggregate toward the top of the food chain or the bottom of the food chain in corporate organizations. Yeah. Which is interesting. Yeah. And I would guess that would mostly be whether it was covert or overt narcissists.

I'm not sure. But in a lot of ways, being a narcissist, your personality traits can be valued or prized at a company, if you're in sales and you have limitless confidence. And if you don't make a sale, it's because that guy was an idiot, not because you didn't do a very good job, so you're just right on to the next guy to sell to the next person. That's highly valuable, right? But eventually, somebody's going to criticize you, a co-worker or something like that. It's going to hit you the wrong way.

You're not going to take it very well because you're going to know that they're right. But your response to that kind of thing is not to go chew it over, process whether you actually agree with it, whether they're right or not. And then if you decide that they are, to take that as advice and become a better person from it, that's not your MO as a person with narcissistic personality disorder. You're going to bite the other person's head off. You're going to create a conflict at work that probably has to be smoothed over by multiple parties or maybe you'll end up fired or demoted or who knows.

So it can go both ways and it usually goes both ways within a career or a job for a person with clinical narcissism. Yeah. To put it mildly, you're lacking in interpersonal skills for sure. So as far as the science behind it, there's like the hard science, there's not a ton, but they did this one study I thought was pretty interesting is they looked at people in the old MRI machine in Berlin and they, at least people that they thought had narcissistic personality disorder and they found that the cerebral cortex of these people were significantly

thinner than normal and that's where we foster empathy. So there definitely could be something to that. And then that other study I thought was interesting was, and this is kind of along the lines of treatment was they sat people down a narcissist and showed them videos of, what was it, videos of just things going wrong with people? Sad documentaries. Yeah. Sad documentaries.

So my brother's keeper is what they watched. Oh, really? No. Okay. Oh man, what's that one documentary, the saddest thing I've ever seen? Great Gardens, Thin Blue Line, Vernon, Florida. No, you're just naming documentaries now. Yeah.

I know you. Which one? Oh, I can't remember. It was the one about the, it was the one about a murder, it was just devastating. I can't remember. Oh, Deer Zachary. Yeah. Oh God.

Man. Holy cow. That was, I could barely get through that thing. Yeah. It was as bad as it gets because it was real. Yeah. So, which most documentaries are? Sure.

They showed Deer Zachary to people, to narcissists and they measure their heart rate and apparently the empathetic response, your heart rate will go up and they were just flat lined, well not flat lined because they were dead, but they were just had their normal heart rate going and then they showed them, I don't know if it was the same one, but they showed them another documentary where they just coached them and said, hey, what if this were you? Put yourself in their shoes and all of a sudden they, it changed and their heart rate increased. So the question was like, is it that easy? Is merely suggesting to a narcissist, hey, why don't you think of it from another point

of view? Like, so the question is, are they unable or unwilling to do so? Well, I think that's the case with anyone who lacks empathy. Like even in our psychopath episode, we talked about the potential ability for psychopaths to empathize, they just have to be told, you should empathize now. And then, you know, it's just not an automatic thing for people who lack empathy. But I think psychopaths fake the empathy though, that's the difference, isn't it? I don't remember.

I think they were able to rationalize why or they would be able to rationalize the outcome of empathy, like, oh, that person wouldn't want that to happen to them. I should probably stop rooting on the bad thing. Right. Um, this, I guess this is a little different than that, like, oh, okay, I'll turn on my empathy now. Yeah. You're right.

Should we take a break? Yeah. All right. Well, let's take a break and, well, we'll talk a little bit more about narcissism after this. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and non-stop references to the best decade ever.

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And so will my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yep, we know that Michael. And a different hot sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life, step by step. Oh, not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life.

Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen. So we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Okay, we're back, Chuck, and as you promised, we're going to talk a little more about narcissists. There was this one thing I thought was fairly interesting in our own article where we talked about evolutionary psychology.

They did a 2004 study with modeling techniques, computer modeling, where they looked at facial, whether or not couples look like each other when they hook up. Like that Conan O'Brien segment. I don't remember, but they just take two celebrities and put them together and make them look like kids. God, that was the best, if they made it or something like that. So what they did found was that they saw a correlation, at least, in what they called assortative mating, where basically you seek those who look like you, which I thought was

fairly interesting. They thought that could tie in a little bit with narcissism. Maybe it has a biological basis, and that would actually tie into the idea that we hit our narcissistic peak during our reproductive years, and then it wanes as we age and age out of reproductiveness, right? So maybe it is kind of correlated to it, and then if your synapses just fuse a little too much, you can become narcissistic to a clinical degree. Who knows?

Yeah. No one knows. That's the point. So that's the problem with this field of research is no one knows, but people are diagnosed with narcissistic personality disorder every day. Nobody can agree on the prevalence. Our article says 7.7% of men in the US, 4.8% of women, that washes out to 6.2% average among the genders.

I saw 1%. I also saw 200,000, which is way less than 1% in the US. No one has any idea what the prevalence is, and they're not sure why. There's a couple of proposals for why. One is that the narcissistic personality disorder criteria that we went over places a lot of emphasis on that overt type of narcissist, and undervalues the covert type, right? And so it's possible that there are way more narcissists out there than would be caught by the NPD criteria and the DSM, right?

Yeah, it's just so tough with personality disorders that, to me, clearly exist on a spectrum to kind of pin down anything, you know? Like they have the online test you can take. I took it myself because I was curious. I scored an 11 out of 40. That's not very narcissistic. No. I was a little disappointed.

I was hoping to be in the single digits. I did not take the test. Oh, yeah? I imagine you were thinking about me when you took it, so I just left it at that. Do you think I was talking about you? Because I'm a narcissist. Oh, okay. No, that you were thinking about me while you were taking the test.

Oh, no, I didn't think about you. I was answering for myself. And 11 out of 40, I thought, was, I can't remember. I mean, it broke it down. It showed averages and stuff like that, and then it showed you where you were more likely or where your sub traits, like out of those 11, let's say seven of those out of the 11 was a specific sub trait. So that was sort of helpful, but I just looked at it and was like, oh, well, maybe I should

work on that stuff. Get down into the single digits. Yeah, you're going to try to get your test score down? Sure. Check it out, man. Keep me posted, will you? Personal growth. There's another inventory you can take.

I'm trying to find the name of it, which is, it kind of gets the covert type out in the open. Yeah. It's called the maladaptive covert narcissism scale. So there were 40 questions on the MPD personality inventory. Yeah. This one's like 23, and you give it a score between one and five, whereas with the narcissistic personality inventory, it's like you choose between basically opposite pairs of statements,

right? Yeah. I mean, it wasn't quite opposite. Sometimes they're a little trickier. And there were some that repeated in different ways where I'm like, I see what you're doing there. Right. You can't use psychology on me.

Yeah, but it was also, when I see things like this, I think if you're taking this and you know what it is, and you are a narcissist, you are probably not going to be very honest either because that's part of being the narcissist is like, no, I'm not going to admit that. Oh yeah. If it's a defense mechanism, you wouldn't really be capable of it, you know? Yeah. I thought it was interesting. It would crumble your ego.

That's right. One of the reasons why all of this is up for debate still and why we're having so much fun with it this afternoon is because there's been no definitive study that really looks at a true representative sample of say teenagers in America to determine a baseline to compare today's teams up against, right? There have been studies. So the college kids all around the US have been given for years and years and years now the narcissistic personality inventory and they're usually psychology students.

So that's usually a select group from an already select group from the population which is college students. So you're not really looking at a representative sample of all teens in America at the time, but from that select group of a select group, they've found that personality among some different colleges, narcissistic personality traits apparently has risen by about two questions from the late 80s till the mid 2000s. And then other people are like, no, no, no, that's all wrong. First of all, you guys are comparing tests from different colleges and different eras.

That's terrible. What we need is somebody to get together all of the teenagers in America or a huge representative sample of them, say, just give it out to all high schools in the United States to take on one day and start that, do it now and then start using that as your baseline for 20, 30 years out. Then we can actually say whether narcissism is increasing, right? Right. The closest thing they've got is that thing that they've been giving to high school kids

since the 70s. It's great. It has the best, the more you know type name. It's called monitoring the future. Yeah. I love it. That sounds like such a great US government test for high school students. But it's from the National Institute on Drug Abuse and apparently it's an annual survey

of 50,000 high school students and it doesn't directly measure narcissism, but it measures parts of a personality, personality dimensions related to it, like self-esteem, egoism, individualism and what they found is that self-esteem, well actually all of those factors are basically exactly the same in 2006 as they were in 1976. Interesting. Apparently that would undermine the idea that narcissism is on the rise, but if somebody tells you narcissism is on the rise, next time they say that, you say, how do you know? Tell them Josh's saying it.

There you go. Well, yeah, I mean there are people that say like it's an epidemic and other, because of social media mainly and selfies and Instagram and I just, I don't know man, I don't, I think that's something when, like I've seen people, I've witnessed people taking selfies like a dozen of them trying to get it just right and making the face and the pout and doing all that. Yeah, it's not pretty to see. It's not and I see that and I think, is that narcissism or is that just, I don't know.

To me it's a personality trait that any and all of us have and under the right circumstances it can be brought out easier for some than others, but our society has changed enough so that it is far more socially acceptable and even socially encouraged through social media to do those kind of things, right? Yeah. I don't think that that necessarily translates automatically to a rise in narcissism. I think it's just a change in society. Some people are like, those people have always been around.

They're just more visible because they're doing it at the public pool now or in a bar. Whereas in the fifties, they would have been laughed out of that bar or out of that pool had they done that, but they were still around. It just wasn't socially acceptable for them to do stuff like that. Yeah. I guess I think I'm having a hard time but in the words, but I think I think that true narcissism is a lot deeper than that and that can just be like, hey, I think I'm really hot and I like to take pictures of myself, but maybe I'm also very empathetic and have

great interpersonal skills and I see other people's point of view a lot, but I'm super stuck up. I don't think just because you take a lot of selfies or you're obsessed with social media means you're narcissistic. I think it goes way, narcissism goes way deeper than that and it's like a tunnel vision where you are only seeing things from your own point of view. I mean, that's part of it. Then I think the other part of it too is, yeah, maybe millennials do have overinflated

self-esteem or maybe they're this wonderful generation that's actually really dedicated to changing the world for a positive view. The problem is when you start to paint the whole generation with a single brush and that's been done with narcissism, which I think really undermines the value of the term. For sure. So there's plenty more to talk about. If you want to learn more about narcissism, you can just dive into the internet and find out what your local blogger thinks about it because they guarantee you they've written

about it. And since I said that, it's time for Listener Mail. I'm going to call this one sad, horny bunnies. This all makes sense in a second. I have no idea what this one is. During your recent flu show, guys, you explained that it was Iowa doc Richard Schoep who first isolated the flu virus. That was likely the achievement that made him famous, but not the reason why my family

knows of his work. We live in the Twin Cities, shout out to the Twin Cities. Yeah. Where we've seen many rabbits with a horrifying disease. It causes them to grow what appear to be horns, sometimes just one or two, occasionally half a dozen or more. And though the growths are often right where an animal would have horns, sometimes they sprout from near rabbits' mouth or eyes, making survival pretty challenging.

A few years ago, when we investigated this creepy rabbit illness we learned it was Richard Schoep who first isolated and identified the virus that causes it. It's now called the Schoep papilloma virus. SPV is similar to some papilloma viruses in humans, which can lead to fun things like general warts or cervical cancer. In fact, thanks to the work of Schoep, other researchers and these spooky looking rabbits, we have medical successes like the HPV vaccine. It is not critical to my life, this information, but it certainly makes it more interesting.

And that's why I'm always listening to stuff you should know. And that is from Jane Niemeyer in the Twin Cities. Nice. And did you look it up? I did. And if you want to see heartbreaking photos of bunnies with horns coming out of their face, just look up Schoep papilloma virus rabbits. And it is so sad because there's nothing cuter on the planet, almost in a bunny rabbit.

And you see these things, you're just like, man. What did you do to deserve this bunny? Oh, it's the worst. Well, thanks a lot. What was the name of the author? Jane. Jane. Thanks a lot, Jane.

Appreciate that. Thanks for bringing us down. If you want to bring us down like Jane did, you can tweet to us at S-Y-S-K podcast through Josh Ome Clark. You can hang out with us on facebook.com slash stuff you should know or slash Charles W. Chuck Bryant. You can send us an email at stuffpodcast.howstuffworks.com. And as always, join us at our home on the web, stuffyoushouldknow.com.

For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howstuffworks.com. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever

you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye.

Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts.