“National narcissism” is rife, finds survey of 35 countries

This study could also be seen as evidence for a cousin of the famous Lake Wobegon effect, or the tendency of people to overestimate their abilities, leading a majority of individuals to view themselves as “above average” in various domains. It shouldn’t be surprising, given what we know about in-group psychology, that people often err similarly when evaluating their own groups relative to others. It would be fascinating to see a study like this repeated on a larger, more cross-nationally representative group of respondents. One could make a case for more highly educated people both overestimating or underestimating their countries’ historical importance, relative to less educated ones (maybe the highly educated, knowing more history, are hit harder by the availability heuristic — or maybe they’re simply better with numbers, so the less educated would make even higher estimates). As of now, the researchers admit they aren’t quite sure why they found what they found. “None of our measures accounted for much of the variance [in national narcissism], nor were estimates especially inflated in individualistic societies compared to collectivistic societies… National narcissism was higher in materialistic, more collectivistic and hierarchical cultures, but explained variance was small.” There’s a lot more work to be done to better understand this phenomenon, in other words, and the first step will be to harvest data from bigger, more nationally representativ...
Source: BPS RESEARCH DIGEST - Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Tags: Cross-cultural guest blogger Social Source Type: blogs