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>Measuring narcissism was tricky, Hambrick said. Self-reporting was not exactly an option, so he chose a set of indirect measures: the prominence of each CEO’s

by Aqwis 11y ago

>Measuring narcissism was tricky, Hambrick said. Self-reporting was not exactly an option, so he chose a set of indirect measures: the prominence of each CEO’s picture in the company’s annual report; the size of the CEO’s paycheck compared with that of the next-highest-paid person in the company; the frequency with which the CEO’s name appeared in company press releases. Lastly, he looked at the CEO’s use of pronouns in press interviews, comparing the frequency of the first-person plural with that of the first-person singular. Then he rolled all the results into a single narcissism indicator. It must be nice to be able to just make up and use a method for identifying "narcissists" without having to test whether the people you're identifying as narcissists are, in fact, narcissists. In my opinion, if this is how you do research you can hardly call what you do science.

parennoob 11y ago
True, and the "first person singular = narcissism" equation that this makes struck me as strongly inappropriate. With this metric, a CEO who takes personal responsibility (e.g. "I instructed the finance department to do X, and I'm sorry about that but it is a necessity for reasons Y and Z") is going to be identified as a narcissist compared to the one who hides behind words weasel words like ("We architected and rolled out a brand new program, which we hope you will like very much (not)"). If that is your measure of narcissism, then it's fine -- but it should probably be called something else. I wouldn't be surprised at all if the first CEO in the above example was more successful than the second.
- quietplatypus 11y ago
  We have to keep up with the game. There's a recent (maybe not lol) prevalence of narcisstic people who love to avoid using personal pronouns and turn up the false objectivity.
- WalterSear 11y ago
  As a former psychology researcher, I would hazard, that like any decent, published, study, they validated their measurements before using them. Minutiae like this is often missed in the press description.
  - philh 11y ago
    If you (or anyone) happens to have journal access and feel like checking, this seems to be the paper: http://asq.sagepub.com/content/52/3/351.abstract http://asq.sagepub.com/content/52/3/351.abstract It's not mentioned in the abstract either, but I don't know whether we'd expect it to be.
    - WalterSear 11y ago
      It's not usually mentioned there. The length of the abstract is usually limited by the publishing journal - it can often be as little as 100-150 words.
- dear 11y ago
  When taking credits, use "I". It's called leadership. When admitting mistake, use "we". Teamwork you know.
quietplatypus 11y ago
Yeah the first person pronoun prevlaence could just as well be a sign of personal writing style or a very non-narcissistic sense of social responsibility in wanting to be absolutely clear about what one did.
enraged_camel 11y ago
I agree. At one of my previous employers, managers loved to casually mention the CEO's name in conversation and in emails in order to not only sound more authoritative and in-the-know, but also nip any disagreements in the bud. The CEO wasn't a narcissist at all, but if this study was conducted there they would inevitably be labeled as such.
- CurtMonash 11y ago
  There is a definitive movie scene for that -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_KXbKa2crI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_KXbKa2crI :) The punchline is around the 1:05 mark. I believe that set a record for fewest minutes on screen in an Oscar-winning role. (Judi Dench as Queen Elizabeth in Shakespeare in Love.)
dpweb 11y ago
Reminds me of that recent article that the best way to identify a narcissist is to just ask them (true narcissists will readily admit it). That line in Patton (probably my favorite movie) where he says "Hell, I know I'm a prima donna. I admit it." Still does not pay to be an asshole though. If you want to call them assholes - I believe Jobs and Patton would have been just as successful if they had not been. But their legacies are (maybe forever) tarnished because of it. Patton could have just as easily not gotten the chance to stage his magnificent campaign across Europe - just because of an "asshole" move. It wasn't worth it. Proves that people do still care about how others are treated.
- WalterSear 11y ago
  > I believe Jobs and Patton would have been just as successful if they had not been. But their legacies are (maybe forever) tarnished because of it. Except the research doesn't support this opinion.
  - marcus_holmes 11y ago
    well according to the article it does; both "givers" and "assholes" have a u-shaped distribution curve: they tend to do either very well or very badly. Jobs and Patton could have been givers with the same results, or even better. And the article even points out that Jobs had significantly reduced his asshole tendencies during the more successful part of his career. "Being nice" doesn't get you anywhere, but that's not the same as being a giver.
  - curiously 11y ago
    what research? there's hardly anything in the article to suggest that it exceeds the quality of a 2AM red bull fueld college paper written by a student.
- sliverstorm 11y ago
  I think it's funny we think we can pick-and-choose. "If only Patton had been just as great but less of an asshole". What if that was an important part of making him the great leader he was? Traditionally negative traits can sometimes contribute to effective leadership. the slapping incidents were an example to Eisenhower, Marshall, and other leaders of Patton's brashness and impulsiveness His most successful and famous campaigns can be described as brash and impulsive!
MrTonyD 11y ago
I was an Oracle Product Manager for the core database. Larry would often offer to be available for anything that might raise the profile of Oracle. He also solicited suggestions for anything high-profile to get involved with - sports, causes, whatever. He said that his goal was to be someone who could call any CEO in the world, and no matter how much that CEO might hate Oracle, the CEO would still take his call. And if the CEO took his call then Larry would use his wealth in any way possible to make the sale. Larry is guilty of a lot of things - but his high profile was very calculated and served business interests.
- hitekker 11y ago
  May I ask if what caused you to leave Oracle? I'm getting the impression that Larry is checking out now; the engagement he had ten years ago doesn't seem to be there anymore.
  - MrTonyD 11y ago
    I have an answer you won't expect: I had been a PM, and I was invited to a meeting. When I arrived, it was a small conference room with the lights out and two very serious guys in suits. I went in, sat down, and asked who else we were expecting, and what the meeting was about. They replied that no one else was expected. Then I was asked if I'd seen the paper that morning. I had, and the front page said that Oracle had just purchased a well-known company. They explained that my name had come up as someone to lead the new acquisition. So I asked why we bought it. I was told that Larry took any opportunity to buy a potential competitor. My role would be to spend perhaps a year understanding their technology deeply. Then some number of months creating an integration plan for any technology we might want to keep. Then managing an Oracle team responsible for integrating the technology into Oracle products. And finally winding down the company. Well, I've spent my entire career creating things. And now I was being asked to destroy things. So I thought "Is this what I want to do?". So I turned down an offer that was really coming from Larry and senior management - I figured it was time to go. (This was over 10 years ago - Larry was still very involved.)
    - 11y ago
danieltillett 11y ago
Why I am hardly a defender of the social sciences this is exactly how you are supposed to do this. You create a hypothesis and then you test to see if it correlates with the effect you are interested in. You of course should not develop your hypothesis and test on the same set of subjects or else you just end up with garbage. Of course there is still the slight problem of determining whatever correlates you have found actually correlate with an abstract state like narcissism.
- mattmanser 11y ago
  "[T]he slight problem" is exactly what the parent is complaining about.
  - danieltillett 11y ago
    Yes, but I was referring to the making up a method section of their complaint.
scotty79 11y ago
Actually he could just ask. Self identifying as narcissistic corelates very strongly with being narcissistic.
- rhizome 11y ago
  Does it? How so?
  - scotty79 11y ago
    http://www.latimes.com/science/sciencenow/la-sci-sn-how-to-identify-a-narcissist-with-one-simple-question-20140805-story.html http://www.latimes.com/science/sciencenow/la-sci-sn-how-to-i...
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
curiously 11y ago
>It must be nice to be able to just make up and use a method for identifying "narcissists" without having to test whether the people you're identifying as narcissists are, in fact, narcissists. In my opinion, if this is how you do research you can hardly call what you do science. This is rampant in socio/psycho academia and professionals. Not saying ALL of them are like this but in general, it is not a quantitative or strictly scientific field. Lot of the work done in this industry is self-fulfilling prophecies and their time is mostly spent on fabricating/bending truths and hard facts and say "here's a statistically significant outcome therefore assholes are great leaders". It's laughable and I've stopped reading the article because I felt like it's built on the same shoddy science work and poor understanding of statistics and it's significance.
msellout 11y ago
How would you identify if someone is in fact a narcissist? What does it mean to be a narcissist? The problem with words is that people think they have a specific meaning. He created one for his study -- narcissism is defined as some weighted combination of those metrics.
- NotOscarWilde 11y ago
  What you describe is verbal sleight of hand. With one hand, one pretends the word "narcissist" has only the precise meaning of the paper, and with the other hand one does not shy away from using that word outside its context, so that everyone, including readers of this article, think of the common accepted meaning.
vasilipupkin 11y ago
Certain qualities like narcissism are not measurable precisely, so he created the next best thing, which is precisely defined according to a formula, and, hopefully, correlates highly with true narcissism. This is exactly how do you social science research
- vasilipupkin 11y ago
  for example, if you wanted to do research on whether or not smarter CEOs increase shareholder value, how would you go about it ? Intelligence is hard to measure, but we know things like test scores correlate with it to some degree. So, maybe, you would see how well companies do against CEO SAT scores or undergraduate institution they attended or their high school gpa
  - krick 11y ago
    Then you have to admit that measuring correlation between "smarter CEOs" and "shareholder value" is impossible and measure correlation between "CEO SAT scores" and "shareholder value" instead. Yeah, not that click-baity, but that would be a real study, unlike this one.
    - malka 11y ago
      if you have a correlation between A and B, and a correlation between B and C, then A and C are correlated.
      - chengsun 11y ago
        This is not true in general. Consider two independent fair die rolls, with A and C being the outcomes. Let B be the sum of the outcomes. The higher A is, the higher B is likely to be, so A and B are positively correlated. So are B and C. However there is no correlation between A and C as they are independent.
        malka 11y ago
hnnewguy 11y ago
How did I know that there would be a comment like this at the top, someone criticizing the research for not being science? What is wrong with making up and using a narcissism metric and seeing what it correlates with? It's how social science is done, and how you discover results that are worth exploring. Get off your high horse.
- gd1 11y ago
  Erm, because the first thing a real scientist would do would be to test the narcissism metric and check that it does, you know, actually correlate with narcissism? You can't just invent metrics and hope that they work. > It's how social science is done, and how you discover results that are worth exploring. Do you see the problem here? If you invent metrics, assume they work, then only pursue the ones that produce results "worth exploring"... can you see the problem?
  - ubercow13 11y ago
    How would you do that check if the metric the author chose was the best he could come up with to measure the quality of narcissism? If you want to check your metric correlates with narcissism, what metric B do you check your metric A for correlation with?
    - gd1 11y ago
      Well, obviously there are more painstaking and accurate ways of determining whether a person is a narcissist. No doubt this is hard work. Sit down, talk with them, ask their employees, etc. Do the really hard work for a subset, check that the subset you've tested correlates well to your made-up metric, and only then can you use the made-up metric. You can't just use it without any evidence it works.
      - vacri 11y ago
        What you're describing is just as 'made up' as the metric you're opposing - your 'hard yards' are still based on people's opinions, politicking, and ulterior motives. Keep in mind that even the GP's original quote included at least two references to the difficulty in measuring the trait ('tricky' and 'had to use indirect measures'). It's not like the researcher boldly strode forth and said "This is the way, have faith!". The results are also suitably couched. It seems like this "bad science!" thread is making a mountain out of a molehill.
erikb 11y ago
The funny thing is that there already is real science about how to evaluate an individual's narcissism. Just looking at Wikipedia could have helped that guy a lot http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narcissism http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narcissism
shalmanese 11y ago
Correlating CEO paycheck with corporate success seems especially dubious. You could find an association simply because the CEO was effective and the board wanted to reward the CEO with higher pay. It would have nothing to do with narcissism.

by Aqwis 11y ago

parennoob 11y ago

True, and the "first person singular = narcissism" equation that this makes struck me as strongly inappropriate. With this metric, a CEO who takes personal responsibility (e.g. "I instructed the finance department to do X, and I'm sorry about that but it is a necessity for reasons Y and Z") is going to be identified as a narcissist compared to the one who hides behind words weasel words like ("We architected and rolled out a brand new program, which we hope you will like very much (not)"). If that is your measure of narcissism, then it's fine -- but it should probably be called something else. I wouldn't be surprised at all if the first CEO in the above example was more successful than the second.

quietplatypus 11y ago
We have to keep up with the game. There's a recent (maybe not lol) prevalence of narcisstic people who love to avoid using personal pronouns and turn up the false objectivity.
WalterSear 11y ago
As a former psychology researcher, I would hazard, that like any decent, published, study, they validated their measurements before using them. Minutiae like this is often missed in the press description.
- philh 11y ago
  If you (or anyone) happens to have journal access and feel like checking, this seems to be the paper: http://asq.sagepub.com/content/52/3/351.abstract http://asq.sagepub.com/content/52/3/351.abstract It's not mentioned in the abstract either, but I don't know whether we'd expect it to be.
  - WalterSear 11y ago
    It's not usually mentioned there. The length of the abstract is usually limited by the publishing journal - it can often be as little as 100-150 words.
dear 11y ago
When taking credits, use "I". It's called leadership. When admitting mistake, use "we". Teamwork you know.

quietplatypus 11y ago

Yeah the first person pronoun prevlaence could just as well be a sign of personal writing style or a very non-narcissistic sense of social responsibility in wanting to be absolutely clear about what one did.

enraged_camel 11y ago

I agree. At one of my previous employers, managers loved to casually mention the CEO's name in conversation and in emails in order to not only sound more authoritative and in-the-know, but also nip any disagreements in the bud. The CEO wasn't a narcissist at all, but if this study was conducted there they would inevitably be labeled as such.

CurtMonash 11y ago
There is a definitive movie scene for that -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_KXbKa2crI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_KXbKa2crI :) The punchline is around the 1:05 mark. I believe that set a record for fewest minutes on screen in an Oscar-winning role. (Judi Dench as Queen Elizabeth in Shakespeare in Love.)

dpweb 11y ago

Reminds me of that recent article that the best way to identify a narcissist is to just ask them (true narcissists will readily admit it). That line in Patton (probably my favorite movie) where he says "Hell, I know I'm a prima donna. I admit it." Still does not pay to be an asshole though. If you want to call them assholes - I believe Jobs and Patton would have been just as successful if they had not been. But their legacies are (maybe forever) tarnished because of it. Patton could have just as easily not gotten the chance to stage his magnificent campaign across Europe - just because of an "asshole" move. It wasn't worth it. Proves that people do still care about how others are treated.

WalterSear 11y ago
> I believe Jobs and Patton would have been just as successful if they had not been. But their legacies are (maybe forever) tarnished because of it. Except the research doesn't support this opinion.
- marcus_holmes 11y ago
  well according to the article it does; both "givers" and "assholes" have a u-shaped distribution curve: they tend to do either very well or very badly. Jobs and Patton could have been givers with the same results, or even better. And the article even points out that Jobs had significantly reduced his asshole tendencies during the more successful part of his career. "Being nice" doesn't get you anywhere, but that's not the same as being a giver.
- curiously 11y ago
  what research? there's hardly anything in the article to suggest that it exceeds the quality of a 2AM red bull fueld college paper written by a student.
sliverstorm 11y ago
I think it's funny we think we can pick-and-choose. "If only Patton had been just as great but less of an asshole". What if that was an important part of making him the great leader he was? Traditionally negative traits can sometimes contribute to effective leadership. the slapping incidents were an example to Eisenhower, Marshall, and other leaders of Patton's brashness and impulsiveness His most successful and famous campaigns can be described as brash and impulsive!

MrTonyD 11y ago

I was an Oracle Product Manager for the core database. Larry would often offer to be available for anything that might raise the profile of Oracle. He also solicited suggestions for anything high-profile to get involved with - sports, causes, whatever. He said that his goal was to be someone who could call any CEO in the world, and no matter how much that CEO might hate Oracle, the CEO would still take his call. And if the CEO took his call then Larry would use his wealth in any way possible to make the sale. Larry is guilty of a lot of things - but his high profile was very calculated and served business interests.

hitekker 11y ago
May I ask if what caused you to leave Oracle? I'm getting the impression that Larry is checking out now; the engagement he had ten years ago doesn't seem to be there anymore.
- MrTonyD 11y ago
  I have an answer you won't expect: I had been a PM, and I was invited to a meeting. When I arrived, it was a small conference room with the lights out and two very serious guys in suits. I went in, sat down, and asked who else we were expecting, and what the meeting was about. They replied that no one else was expected. Then I was asked if I'd seen the paper that morning. I had, and the front page said that Oracle had just purchased a well-known company. They explained that my name had come up as someone to lead the new acquisition. So I asked why we bought it. I was told that Larry took any opportunity to buy a potential competitor. My role would be to spend perhaps a year understanding their technology deeply. Then some number of months creating an integration plan for any technology we might want to keep. Then managing an Oracle team responsible for integrating the technology into Oracle products. And finally winding down the company. Well, I've spent my entire career creating things. And now I was being asked to destroy things. So I thought "Is this what I want to do?". So I turned down an offer that was really coming from Larry and senior management - I figured it was time to go. (This was over 10 years ago - Larry was still very involved.)
  - 11y ago

danieltillett 11y ago

Why I am hardly a defender of the social sciences this is exactly how you are supposed to do this. You create a hypothesis and then you test to see if it correlates with the effect you are interested in. You of course should not develop your hypothesis and test on the same set of subjects or else you just end up with garbage. Of course there is still the slight problem of determining whatever correlates you have found actually correlate with an abstract state like narcissism.

mattmanser 11y ago
"[T]he slight problem" is exactly what the parent is complaining about.
- danieltillett 11y ago
  Yes, but I was referring to the making up a method section of their complaint.

scotty79 11y ago

Actually he could just ask. Self identifying as narcissistic corelates very strongly with being narcissistic.

rhizome 11y ago
Does it? How so?
- scotty79 11y ago
  http://www.latimes.com/science/sciencenow/la-sci-sn-how-to-identify-a-narcissist-with-one-simple-question-20140805-story.html http://www.latimes.com/science/sciencenow/la-sci-sn-how-to-i...

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

curiously 11y ago

>It must be nice to be able to just make up and use a method for identifying "narcissists" without having to test whether the people you're identifying as narcissists are, in fact, narcissists. In my opinion, if this is how you do research you can hardly call what you do science. This is rampant in socio/psycho academia and professionals. Not saying ALL of them are like this but in general, it is not a quantitative or strictly scientific field. Lot of the work done in this industry is self-fulfilling prophecies and their time is mostly spent on fabricating/bending truths and hard facts and say "here's a statistically significant outcome therefore assholes are great leaders". It's laughable and I've stopped reading the article because I felt like it's built on the same shoddy science work and poor understanding of statistics and it's significance.

msellout 11y ago

How would you identify if someone is in fact a narcissist? What does it mean to be a narcissist? The problem with words is that people think they have a specific meaning. He created one for his study -- narcissism is defined as some weighted combination of those metrics.

NotOscarWilde 11y ago
What you describe is verbal sleight of hand. With one hand, one pretends the word "narcissist" has only the precise meaning of the paper, and with the other hand one does not shy away from using that word outside its context, so that everyone, including readers of this article, think of the common accepted meaning.

vasilipupkin 11y ago

Certain qualities like narcissism are not measurable precisely, so he created the next best thing, which is precisely defined according to a formula, and, hopefully, correlates highly with true narcissism. This is exactly how do you social science research

vasilipupkin 11y ago
for example, if you wanted to do research on whether or not smarter CEOs increase shareholder value, how would you go about it ? Intelligence is hard to measure, but we know things like test scores correlate with it to some degree. So, maybe, you would see how well companies do against CEO SAT scores or undergraduate institution they attended or their high school gpa
- krick 11y ago
  Then you have to admit that measuring correlation between "smarter CEOs" and "shareholder value" is impossible and measure correlation between "CEO SAT scores" and "shareholder value" instead. Yeah, not that click-baity, but that would be a real study, unlike this one.
  - malka 11y ago
    if you have a correlation between A and B, and a correlation between B and C, then A and C are correlated.
    - chengsun 11y ago
      This is not true in general. Consider two independent fair die rolls, with A and C being the outcomes. Let B be the sum of the outcomes. The higher A is, the higher B is likely to be, so A and B are positively correlated. So are B and C. However there is no correlation between A and C as they are independent.
      - malka 11y ago

hnnewguy 11y ago

How did I know that there would be a comment like this at the top, someone criticizing the research for not being science? What is wrong with making up and using a narcissism metric and seeing what it correlates with? It's how social science is done, and how you discover results that are worth exploring. Get off your high horse.

gd1 11y ago
Erm, because the first thing a real scientist would do would be to test the narcissism metric and check that it does, you know, actually correlate with narcissism? You can't just invent metrics and hope that they work. > It's how social science is done, and how you discover results that are worth exploring. Do you see the problem here? If you invent metrics, assume they work, then only pursue the ones that produce results "worth exploring"... can you see the problem?
- ubercow13 11y ago
  How would you do that check if the metric the author chose was the best he could come up with to measure the quality of narcissism? If you want to check your metric correlates with narcissism, what metric B do you check your metric A for correlation with?
  - gd1 11y ago
    Well, obviously there are more painstaking and accurate ways of determining whether a person is a narcissist. No doubt this is hard work. Sit down, talk with them, ask their employees, etc. Do the really hard work for a subset, check that the subset you've tested correlates well to your made-up metric, and only then can you use the made-up metric. You can't just use it without any evidence it works.
    - vacri 11y ago
      What you're describing is just as 'made up' as the metric you're opposing - your 'hard yards' are still based on people's opinions, politicking, and ulterior motives. Keep in mind that even the GP's original quote included at least two references to the difficulty in measuring the trait ('tricky' and 'had to use indirect measures'). It's not like the researcher boldly strode forth and said "This is the way, have faith!". The results are also suitably couched. It seems like this "bad science!" thread is making a mountain out of a molehill.

erikb 11y ago

The funny thing is that there already is real science about how to evaluate an individual's narcissism. Just looking at Wikipedia could have helped that guy a lot http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narcissism http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narcissism

shalmanese 11y ago

Correlating CEO paycheck with corporate success seems especially dubious. You could find an association simply because the CEO was effective and the board wanted to reward the CEO with higher pay. It would have nothing to do with narcissism.