Narcissistic vigilance to status cues

Abstract

Humans often take decisive action to influence their social environments, including their own position within a social hierarchy. Those who are highly motivated by status attainment may be especially prone to such activity. Here, we ask whether desire for social status contributes to the early detection of social stimuli, and more specifically, whether it plays a role in which environmental stimuli are consciously detected. We used a Rapid Serial Visual Presentation task to examine vigilance to status-relevant versus non-status-relevant stimuli, and asked whether measure of narcissism, a personality trait strongly associated with a drive for status attainment, moderated people's task responses. Results showed that when task stimuli were status relevant, self-reported narcissism moderated stimulus processing such that as participants reported higher levels of narcissism, the likelihood that they would recognize these rapidly presented words increased if they were status relevant, but not if the stimuli were non-status-relevant. These results suggest that the motivations that underpin personality traits, for example the drive to seek social status associated with narcissism, may play a formative role in the early processing and detection of social stimuli, thereby shaping people's social behaviour.