It improves with age.

Narcissists are all around you. They’re selfish, controlling, and have little empathy. But there’s some consolation: These unpleasant personality traits diminish with age, new research shows.

So narcissistic children become less disruptive as they get older, and as they get older, their narcissism decreases. What’s true: Differences between people remain stable. People who are more narcissistic than their peers as children remain so as adults. Swiss researchers have shown.

“These findings have important implications because narcissism can affect people’s lives in many ways, both the lives of narcissists themselves and the lives of their families and friends,” said lead researcher Ulrich Orth of Harvard University. University of Bern.

51 studies were examined.
Orth and colleagues analyzed data from 51 long-term studies, all of which looked at how participants’ levels of narcissism changed over time. In all, the study included nearly 40,000 people, ages 8 to 77, roughly an equal number of men and women. Some of the studies followed participants for decades. Most were conducted in the United States, Canada, and Western Europe, with one in China and one in New Zealand.

Three types of narcissism
Researchers distinguish three types of narcissism: so-called agentic narcissism, which involves feelings of grandiosity or superiority and a strong need for admiration; hostile narcissism, which involves traits such as arrogance, callousness, and lack of empathy; and neurotic narcissism, which involves emotional dysfunction and hypersensitivity. All three forms of narcissism decline from childhood to old age. This is most true of traits such as numbness and emotional dysfunction and slightly less so of feelings of superiority.

However, people’s narcissism relative to their peers doesn’t seem to have changed much over the years. Once you become more narcissistic than average, you’ll stay that way later in life. “This has been true even over very long periods of time, suggesting that narcissism is a stable personality trait,” Orth says.

Social roles
The researcher is now particularly curious about why narcissism declines as people get older. He would like to conduct research on this in the future. “According to one theory, the social roles we adopt as adults—for example, as a partner, parent, or employee—lead to the development of more mature personality traits, including a decline in narcissistic traits,” Orth concludes.