In psychology we like to explore people's attitudes about all sorts of topics, but why? The answer is simple, attitudes can relatively well predict certain behaviors, so by investigating attitudes we can make pretty accurate assumptions on real world consequences. All attitudes have a cognitive, an emotional and a behavior component, that’s why by assessing cognitive and emotional components we can predict the behavior one. Let’s use violence as an example. If Daniel thinks it’s okay to hit Marco and has no unpleasant emotions about hitting him (like shame or remorse) then if Marco angers Daniel in some way, there is a high probability that Daniel will hit him. But what does all of this have to do with narcissists?
In a recent study, Blinkhorn, Lyons and Almond (2016) investigated attitudes that narcissists have about violence. But before we get to their interesting findings, we must talk about what narcissists are. When we say narcissist, we are not referring to a clinical diagnosis of narcissistic personality disorder, but rather to people who are characterized with higher levels of a dark personality trait of narcissism (the trait we all possess in higher or lower levels). Narcissism, in general, consists of a low empathy, distorted and inflated view of self and one’s abilities and need for admiration and attention. Also, narcissism is a mix of adaptive (socially useful) and maladaptive (socially limiting) features and three components of which leadership and authority is an adaptive feature, feelings of entitlement and exploitativness of others is a maladaptive and component of grandiosity exhibitionism which is both adaptive and maladaptive.
This model of narcissism was used in the study to see the attitudes of narcissists towards four kinds of violence (war, corporal punishment of children, penal code violence and intimate violence) (Blinkhorn, Lyons, & Almond, 2016). In their study, Blinkhorn, Lyons and Almond (2016) used self-report measures on a sample of 329 participants and found that both male and female narcissists have positive attitudes towards all of the four kinds of violence, in other words narcissism is correlated with more positive attitudes towards violence, regardless of the persons gender. When we look closer we can see the interesting finding that both adaptive and maladaptive components have a significant correlation with positive attitudes towards violence (except for authority and penal code violence in males, but I would guess it as a more methodological problem of relatively small sample of men), while the component of grandiosity is not correlated at all with any attitude towards violence except in a case of males and intimate violence (also the only significant gender difference).
What does all this mean? Generally speaking, it means that people who are more narcissistic have more positive attitudes towards violence and because of that are more prone to violent behavior. But looking at the specific characteristics of narcissism we can make assumptions about causes of this attitudes and later behaviors. For example, children who grow up in an abusive environment usually grow up to have more accepting attitudes towards corporal punishment towards children and authority and leadership characteristic has been linked to having recollections of a punishing and cold mother (Jonason, Lyons, & Bethell, 2014, as cited in Blinkhorn, Lyons, & Almond, 2016).
Other than theoretical implications, from this research we can get some practical knowledge about reducing violent behavior with changing attitudes (not an easy thing to do, but that doesn’t mean we should give up). And in a short term, if you know someone who is narcissistic try not to get in situations that have a possible violent outcome with them.
References
Blinkhorn, V., Lyons, M., & Almond, L. (2016). Drop the bad attitude! Narcissism predicts acceptance of violent behaviour. Personality and Individual Differences, 98, 157-161.