Narcissistic Personality Inventory

Do you remember when you used to fuck sixteen year olds, which is to say you were still in junior high and the dumbass girls in your class were all crazy about Michael Jacksonⁱ, kept filling in those ridiculous self-made questionnaires and generally behaved like the vapid, daydreaming ditzes that immediately postpubescent girls are ?

Ok then, I suppose this quote might drive it all home :

200 celebrities, as defined as famous people who appeared on Loveline, were given the Narcissistic Personality Inventory and compared to 200 MBA students.

Guess what? Celebrities scored higher than MBA students. Big surprise.

But some interesting findings:

Female celebrities scored higher on every component than males, but especially high on exhibitionism, superiority, and vanity. (The other components are exploitativeness, authority, entitlement and self-sufficiency.)

Breaking the celebrities down according to "profession":

Reality TV stars had the highest scores, (most significantly in exploitativeness) followed by comedians and actors (close 3rd), then musicians.

The MBAs showed the opposite distribution: males were more narcissistic than females, especially entitlement and self-sufficiency.

Here's their results :

At which point I went "eh what the hey" and did the NPI for myself.

It came out Authority: 3.00 ; Self-Sufficiency: 3.00 ; Superiority: 1.00 ; Exhibitionism: 1.00 ; Exploitativeness: 5.00 ; Vanity: 0.00 ; Entitlement: 2.00 for a total of 15. With the caveat that binary choice on the "must pick one - pick the most applicable among the two even if not that applicable on its own" paradigm results in data that's not interpretable outside of that context (no, people don't like Obama - people just prefer Obama to that reanimated skeleton/lich that's McCain, otherwise Obama is still and always has been a poopyhead in EVERYONE's eyes), here are the individual responses :

I guess pretty disappointing, I'm not even good enough at it to make it as a celebrity. I will point out however that while my complete failure of vanity is perhaps unsurprising, at the very least the exhibitionism portion is more the failure of the test than my own. I know, by virtue of circumstances not exactly happenstantionary, a large pile of exhibitionist women ; none of these would, as far as I either heard or could conceive, describe or even think their body as "something special" in that sense. I share their view. Nevertheless, I am also a man who both enjoys and practices the fucking of slaves in public, and if the act of public copulation, both deliberate and unexceptional affords the practitioner a score of 1 in exhibitionism...

Let's just say I take a very reserved view of the proposition that the people who make up these tests have much of an inkling of the things they're purporting to discuss. On the continuum between immediately postpubescent girlie discussing matters of love and its immediately prepubescent bowdlerization, and scholar discussing matters of science, I would solidly place these fellows at a 1.0, on a scale going to no less than 10, and perhaps as high as a hundred.

So hooray for science, I guess.

1. He did a Romanian tour at the time. [↩]