One of the big joys of meeting new people is that we are all different. Sure, some personalities fit us better, but I believe we can learn a lot from each other, and therefore, different is always good.
However, there are some personalities that could be tricky to handle, for example, those who are narcissistic. Now, a criminal psychologist reveals that you can tell who is and who isn’t by asking one simple question.
The term “narcissistic” is probably a word you’ve heard before. Perhaps someone in your family or friend group has said it about someone they don’t like, but what does it really mean?
The Mayo Clinic describes a narcissistic personality disorder as a “mental health condition in which people have an unreasonably high sense of their own importance.” Moreover, a narcissistic person “needs and seek too much attention and want people to admire them.”
“People with this disorder may lack the ability to understand or care about the feelings of others. But behind this mask of extreme confidence, they are not sure of their self-worth and are easily upset by the slightest criticism,” it further reads.
While you, like the Mayo Clinic writes, could check certain boxes when it comes to knowing if a person is a narcissist, it’s not always easy.
A psychologist reveals the one question that can prove if someone is a narcissist
However, speaking to LADbible, 38-year-old psychologist Dr Julia Shaw, who also hosts the television series Murder in Mind on the True Crime Channel, has stated that you can actually tell if a person is narcissistic by asking one simple question.
“People love this term right now, don’t they? Narcissist,” Shaw said in a video on the YouTube channel LADbible Stories.
She added that anyone could be a narcissist, and claimed you can spot who is by asking specific questions. There has been a list of 20 questions you can ask, which has recently been cut down to 15 by psychologists. However, there is one, which Shaw explained is the “single item narcissism scale.
“Which is literally just the question, ‘Are you a narcissist?'” she said, adding that it’s surprisingly “useful.”
“How do you spot a narcissist? Ask them,” she continued. “A narcissist would probably answer to this question, ‘Yeah but like, I am better than most people. It’s a realistic appraisal of myself,’ because that’s what narcissism is. It’s that overconfidence, it’s that thinking you’re great and thinking you’re better than you actually are.”
“People who are narcissists are almost proud of the fact”
The fact that you can ask a narcissist the question right out doesn’t even have to be a thing that will offend the person in question.
In 2014, a study from Ohio State University also claimed that one question can be enough to determine another person’s narcissistic traits.
That time, the question was: “How narcissistic are you?”
“People who are narcissists are almost proud of the fact,” Brad Bushman, one of the study’s co-authors, said at the time. “You can ask them directly because they don’t see narcissism as a negative quality—they believe they are superior to other people and are fine with saying that publicly.”
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