The idea that narcissism could be connected to crime struck me years ago when I was given a book on the Enneagram, an ancient Sufi system consisting of nine personality types.1 As I suspect most people do, I first tried to identify my own personality. If my analysis was correct, I was a type One – The Reformer – what clinical psychology would refer to as obsessive-compulsive disorder. I found the descriptions of all nine types fascinating, but the one that drew my attention most was type Three, what the author termed The Status Seeker.2 The chapter on the Three clearly portrayed narcissists, and the neutral label came across as an effort to put a charitable spin on what many consider an uncomplimentary set of traits. The book’s author, Don Richard Riso, described the characteristics of the Three:
If they are healthy, Threes are worthy of the admiration of others because they have taken pains to acquire the qualities and skills they seem to embody virtually to an ideal degree. The overwhelming positive self-esteem of healthy Threes has a basis in fact, and they are often highly regarded by others, both in their personal lives and in their careers. Healthy Threes are outstanding, human nature’s stars.3
The author went on to caution the reader about the type’s unhealthier side: “… Threes exploit others so they can maintain what has become a spurious superiority. They are extremely devious if they are in danger of losing the competition between themselves and others in which they see themselves always engaged. They become so jealous that they maliciously try to ruin others to achieve the triumph their narcissistic superiority requires.”4 Riso’s chapter on the Three painted a portrait of an individual capable of achieving great success but also inflicting great harm.
Notable Threes in the first edition of Riso’s book included Jimmy Carter, Brooke Shields, and Sylvester Stallone, a list later updated to include Alec Baldwin, Oprah Winfrey, and Justin Bieber.5 Also appearing on the original list were Gary Gilmore, the convicted murderer who in 1977 became the first person executed after the end of the US moratorium on the death penalty,6 and Ted Bundy, one of the most notorious serial killers in American history. As a graduate student specializing in criminology, I wanted to learn more about this personality.
My graduate training prompted me to search the empirical literature, not on the Enneagram, which was all but nonexistent at the time,7 but on the Three’s mainstream counterpart, narcissism. It was in the literature of social-personality psychology where I found published studies, based on experiments carried out in university labs, which investigated narcissism and its association with a variety of traits and behaviors. Among the revelations were that narcissists tend to consider themselves superior, they feel entitled to special treatment, they exploit others and, when their egos feel threatened, they retaliate angrily, sometimes aggressively.
Once we open our eyes to new psychological knowledge, it’s natural to apply it in our own personal world. The government agency in which I worked at the time employed a combination of political appointees and career public servants. One appointee, a woman in her early thirties, landed her job through her father who had been a prominent politician and big-city mayor. My fellow staff members and I were put off by her frequent Friday appointments outside the office, conveniently scheduled in the afternoon to shorten her workday. While our office was an appendage of the Governor’s Office, we were physically and practically separated from the state’s chief executive. Our entitled colleague would nevertheless announce to constituents that she was from “the Governor’s Office,” drawing on cachet that was not rightfully hers. My armchair diagnosis found confirmation when this woman, having been blocked from a coveted position by one of our male colleagues, called his father-in-law to inform him that his son-in-law was having an extramarital affair, which brought about an abrupt end to the latter’s marriage. As frightening as I found her retaliation, the experience was eye-opening for a young social scientist-in-training who had just witnessed up close narcissistic injury and narcissistic rage.
I personally have struggled with a lifelong obsession with fairness and justice, no doubt part of my “Reformer” baggage. Whereas narcissists seek status and attention, those with an obsessive-compulsive bent tend to be more reserved and focus on rules and fairness.8 They prefer order in the world and pass judgment on people who threaten that order. In college this obsessiveness led me to major in criminology, which involves, at least in part, the study of extreme and harmful unfairness. A graduate course exposed me to equity theory, a social psychological perspective concerned with imbalances of inputs and outcomes in dyadic exchanges.9 At the core of equity theory lay two common behavioral responses, exploitation and retaliation, both potential threats to distributive justice. I finally had a theory to help me make sense of my obsession.
My doctoral education took place within a department of sociology well-known for training academic criminologists. Despite the first-rate reputation of the faculty, I found their dismissal of human agency limiting and not in keeping with what I observed in my own social world. After all, people are not simply marionettes dancing at the ends of strings manipulated by amorphous social forces. They can and do make choices about possible courses of action. What my sociological training did accomplish, among many other things, was to instill in me an abiding appreciation of the unique aspects of organizations, social structure, and culture that transcend the individual. Still, I didn’t understand why social and behavioral scientists tended to choose one level of explanation and ignore the others. Shouldn’t they all be reconcilable?
Throughout graduate school and beyond I found myself dissatisfied with prevailing theories on crime. Some emphasized the importance of society’s reactions to crime and criminals10 over social norms and their violation. Others focused on macro-level social forces such as structural disadvantage but ignored individual differences such as personality. I saw the need for a theory that would build on their respective strengths, overcome their weaknesses, and reconcile the supporting research. A personal requirement was that this new perspective must somehow link narcissism, fairness, and crime.
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Numerous books on narcissism have appeared in the early twenty-first century. The Narcissism Epidemic.11 The Narcissist You Know.12 The Narcissist Next Door.13 These titles and others have given impressive coverage to narcissism’s contours and growth and have educated those who were eager for advice on how to cope with this type of personality. Nefarious Reflections: On Narcissism and Crime, however, has a different mission. Based on the assumption that narcissism is widespread and growing, it follows three lines of inquiry and tracks their convergence. One is the search for the causes of crime. For more than a hundred years, sociologists, psychologists, economists, anthropologists, geographers, political scientists, legal scholars, and others have sought to clarify criminal behavior through their respective disciplinary lenses. And although criminology has long been dominated by sociology and its more macro view of society, criminologists are once again investigating causes of crime that inhere in the individual. With new forms of data, they have been able to take a fresh and fascinating look at the interaction between the human organism and the environment.14 This has caused genuine, though understandable, consternation among some criminologists over the possible misuses of biological inferences as in the past15 and of losing the unique insights of sociology, such as the importance of “neighborhood,” in explaining crime.16 But this trend has freed others to pursue research on heredity, physiology, and personality. Given these developments, do other disciplines such as history have something to offer the contemporary study of crime?
The second line of inquiry brings in norms of fairness and reciprocity. These find expression in both civilized and primitive societies, and they prevail in the most basic of social relations. If a man steals someone else’s automobile, he has committed a crime. But independent of any legal proscription, his actions have netted him an undeserved outcome. It is simply unfair. A friend who never reciprocates by picking up the check at a restaurant is a different kind of exploiter. Their behavior is not criminal, but it is irritating because it violates common notions of fairness. And although society considers motor vehicle theft far more serious than failing to pick up a check, both breach fairness norms. The time has come to elevate these norms to a more prominent role in explaining harmful behavior and society’s reaction to it than they have played in the past.
Certain forms of crime, then, violate fairness norms codified into laws. But if there were no laws prohibiting these behaviors, wouldn’t most people still consider them wrong and harmful? Which social norms do the underlying behaviors violate? A norm against robbery? A norm against fraud? No, it is the violation of fairness norms we object to, whether they are grounded in social propriety or in the criminal law.
Not surprisingly, the third line of inquiry focuses on personality. For decades social-personality psychologists have conducted studies in which narcissistic traits have been identified, refined, and correlated using a wide array of psychometric measures. Might it be possible to translate this body of knowledge into a theory that can inform our efforts to understand, control, and prevent crime?
The working definition of personality need not – and this book argues, should not – be limited to individuals. Some scholars maintain that organizations, too, possess narcissistic personalities. It is this broader definition that guides Nefarious Reflections. According to management experts Dennis Duchon and Michael Burns, “Organizations, like people, are motivated to protect their identities and they do this by rewarding behaviors that will sustain a positive sense of self and reduce collective anxieties. The effort to protect identity can become fixated on relieving anxiety, and when this happens, the identity itself takes on the qualities of narcissism.”17 The notion of organizations having personalities may be difficult to grasp, but if we look at personality as “ways of behaving,”18 we can see that some of these entities do indeed behave narcissistically and criminally.
If organizations can have narcissistic personalities and engage in harmful behavior, why can’t social movements or entire nation-states? Individual white supremacists commit specific crimes for which they can be charged. Likewise, the organizations to which many of them belong can be investigated and prosecuted. But the racial animus that motivates them and their members can spread throughout society like a highly contagious virus. Once this occurs, we are confronting something different and far more threatening than just racist individuals or groups.
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It is not the intention of Nefarious Reflections to vilify all narcissists or to place the blame for all crime on the shoulders of this personality style. Indeed, some narcissistic individuals possess adaptive qualities that make them well-suited to positions of leadership,19 regardless of the arena in which they operate. “For all his inner suffering,” historian Christopher Lasch once noted, “the narcissist has many traits that make for success in bureaucratic institutions, which put a premium on the manipulation of interpersonal relations, discourage the formation of deep personal attachments, and at the same time provide the narcissist with the approval he needs in order to validate his self-esteem.”20 There would be no entertainment industry without actors and comedians and musicians who do their best work under a spotlight or in front of an audience. A celebrity in his own right, Dr. Drew Pinsky, along with University of Southern California business professor Mark Young, conducted a study in which they compared celebrities to MBA students and members of the public on the Narcissistic Personality Inventory. As predicted, the celebrities scored significantly higher on narcissism than the two comparison groups.21 Despite the pejorative connotation of the words narcissism and narcissist, many such individuals are go-getters whose achievements serve as a model to others. Seldom is the world black or white, and along with people possessing a variety of other personality styles, some highly successful, well-adjusted narcissists occupy the vast gray landscape in between.
One could even argue that the so-called maladaptive traits of entitlement and exploitativeness are adaptive from the narcissist’s perspective.22 In a dog-eat-dog world, the person who can get around rules and take advantage of available opportunities may well come out on top, whether in the corporate boardroom or in the prison yard. In a situation in which resources are scarce and where competition for them is keen, can’t many of us imagine wanting just such an individual to lead us to food, water, shelter, and other necessities? Could this be part of the appeal of someone like Donald Trump?
In both primitive and more advanced societies, collective needs may be better met not through competition but through cooperation, and it is here that we see some of the liabilities of a narcissistic posture. Traditional economists might argue that narcissism is nothing more than what we should expect, homo economicus pursuing self-interest at the expense of others. But game theory studies have called this traditional view into question. Economists Ernst Fehr and Herbert Gintis conclude that these research findings “… help us understand why a minority of selfish individuals may make sustaining cooperation in the absence of a punishment mechanism impossible, whereas a minority of strong reciprocators may permit cooperation to flourish when a punishment option is available.”23 As a consequence of narcissists’ self-centeredness, others may consider a relationship with them simply not worth the investment. They may even punish the narcissistic behavior. So, are these traits really serving the needs of narcissists in the long run? They clearly are not serving the needs of everyone else.
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What began as a straightforward analysis of the role of narcissism in criminal behavior broadened to include some relevant history of the United States. Narcissism as a modern social phenomenon may be best understood by examining some of the ways in which it has expressed itself in the past. It is as the American story has unfolded that the relationship between narcissism and criminal behavior becomes clearer.
Nefarious Reflections: On Narcissism and Crime serves as a companion volume to the author’s Fairness and Crime: A Theory,24 which argues that specific behavioral options – exploitation, retaliation, spite, and certain forms of withdrawal – are most detrimental to society and therefore more likely to be defined as criminal. This book attempts to answer the question: In what ways is narcissism responsible for these maladaptive responses, exploitation and retaliation in particular? Nefarious Reflections demonstrates that rather than simply being an off-putting, pervasive personality type that characterizes certain individuals, narcissism is a mindset that underlies much of the behavior society has considered harmful. It picks up where more general works have left off and points out the more damaging consequences of this posture. Through the analysis of both historical and more recent examples, bolstered by findings from several decades of research, this book casts the reader in the role of behavioral scientist, one who can reflect on how and why narcissism wreaks so much havoc and on what society might do to change that in the future.
