I am so wise: agentic narcissism, communal narcissism, and overclaiming among Polish and Italian students

Self-enhancement is the tendency to maintain a positive self-concept, often linked to narcissism. While agentic narcissists enhance their self-image through competence and status, communal narcissists do so through perceived morality and altruism. This study examined the relationship between four forms of grandiose narcissism - admiration, rivalry, sanctity, and heroism - and two self-enhancement strategies: overclaiming and the better-than-average (BTA) effect.

We investigated these relations in Polish and Italian university students (N = 306), considering cross-cultural differences in agency and communion. Participants completed a series of validated self-report measures assessing narcissistic traits, overclaiming tendencies, and self-perceived superiority. The study design incorporated a randomized presentation of variables and ensured measurement invariance across cultural contexts. Furthermore, to mitigate potential collinearity concerns and delineate shared and distinct variance components, we performed commonality analyses.

Initially, we examined the zero-order correlations between narcissistic dimensions and self-enhancement variables, including domain-specific (agentic and communal) overclaiming, actual knowledge, and the BTA effect. To account for the substantial intercorrelations among narcissism subtypes, we subsequently employed multiple regression models to isolate their unique contributions.

Our findings revealed that within agentic narcissism only admiration was positively related to self-enhancement, whereas communal narcissists employed both sanctity and heroism. However, in Italy, communal self-enhancement was expressed only in the BTA effect, suggesting that cultural norms may influence the expression of narcissistic self-enhancement. These findings contribute to the literature on domain-specific self-enhancement, emphasizing the interplay between narcissism, culture, and self-perception.