Don ’t be shy: a dose of narcissism is good for you | Oliver Burkeman

The unhealthy narcissist ’s secret fear is that if he’s not God, he’s nothing. The healthy narcissist knows the middle wayIn what undoubtedly qualifies as one of the sickest burns in modern politics, Denmark ’s finance minister, Kristian Jensen,observed last year, “There are two kinds of European nations: there are small nations and there are countries that have not yet realised they are small nations.” Jensen’s not-so-veiled swipe at Britain was more accurate than he knew. In arecent study, people from 35 nations were asked “What contribution do you think the country you are living in has made to world history?”: 0% meant none, 100% meant they were responsible for all of it. The average British answer was 55% – a level of self-importance exceeded only by Russia, at 61%. The Swiss came bottom at 11%; the Americans , despite a reputation for national egomania, at a relatively modest 30%. Of course, there’s no way to measure a country’s true “percentage of history-making”,as Jesse Singal put it on the Research Digest blog. But we can be sure that people wildly overestimate their own: added up, the averages from each country came to 1156%.Look around and you might conclude we could do with much less “national narcissism”, as the study labels it, and less of the individual variety, too. But the fact that it’s so universal (let’s face it, even that Swiss percentage is surely far too high) suggests a caveat. While too much narcissism is unhealthy...
Source: Guardian Unlimited Science - Category: Science Authors: Tags: Health & wellbeing Life and style Psychology Politics Source Type: news