People with highly self-centered and grandiose personalities often believe they can convince anyone to do anything. A new study shows they might actually succeed at this goal when speaking out loud.
However, when these same individuals attempt to persuade others through writing, their arguments fall flat and fail to impress readers. These findings, published in the Journal of Research in Personality, reveal that the persuasive abilities of self-centered individuals depend heavily on the way they communicate.
Researchers have spent decades evaluating grandiose narcissism as a personality trait. This trait involves a highly self-centered, dominant, and manipulative way of interacting with the world. People with high levels of this trait usually project extreme confidence, charm, and a strong desire to be the center of attention.
Because of these specific traits, highly self-centered individuals constantly seek out higher social status. They want to be admired and respected by others in their daily lives. To achieve this constant validation, the ability to sway other people’s opinions is a highly prized skill.
Joshua D. Foster, a psychology researcher at the University of South Alabama, led a team to investigate whether these individuals are actually as convincing as they claim to be. Foster and his colleagues noticed that self-centered people often make great first impressions and frequently rise to leadership roles. They seem to possess the natural charisma needed for public speaking.
At the same time, the research team recognized that writing requires a vastly different set of skills. When people listen to a speech, they often focus on surface-level cues like the speaker’s confidence, physical attractiveness, or vocal enthusiasm. Psychologists refer to this fast, less critical evaluation as the peripheral route to persuasion.
Reading a written message allows a person to slow down and process the information at their own pace. Readers tend to focus heavily on the logical flow and the actual strength of the arguments presented. This slower, more thoughtful evaluation is known as the central route to persuasion.
Foster and his team suspected that self-centered individuals might struggle with this central route. Crafting a strong written argument requires a person to understand their audience’s perspective and to think critically about their own ideas. Highly self-centered people often lack cognitive empathy, which is the ability to accurately perceive the thoughts and feelings of others.
Because they are often overconfident and resistant to criticism, these individuals might not take the time to refine their written arguments. The researchers wanted to test if this personality type naturally excels at spoken persuasion while failing at written persuasion.
To test their ideas, the researchers set up four separate experiments. The first experiment focused entirely on spoken communication. The research team recruited college students to deliver short speeches about how their university could improve the academic and social experiences of the student body.
Before speaking, the students completed a standard personality questionnaire to measure their levels of grandiose narcissism. The questionnaire asked them to choose between statements like, “I can make anybody believe anything I want them to,” and more humble alternatives. The students then delivered their persuasive speeches on camera.
The student speakers were instructed to make their presentations as strong as possible, and they were given a few minutes to outline their talking points. The researchers placed them in a hallway in front of a camera to record their arguments. The speakers were given unlimited time to talk, with researchers holding up signs to show how much time had passed.
Afterward, the speakers rated how convincing they thought their own presentations would be. A separate group of participants, referred to as targets, later watched these recorded speeches. The targets rated each video based on how convincing they found the speaker.
The results showed that highly self-centered speakers expressed immense confidence in their own speeches. The targets mostly agreed with them. When compared to other speakers in the group, the highly self-centered students were rated as slightly more persuasive.
When the researchers analyzed the viewing data, they looked at how the targets evaluated the speakers relative to each other. They found that targets rated speakers as more persuasive when those specific speakers were more self-centered than the others in their viewing group. The effect was small, but it consistently showed that self-centered speakers had a slight edge over their peers.
The researchers noted that these individuals tended to speak for longer periods of time than their peers. The targets seemed to view longer speeches as better speeches. This extra talking time partially explained why the self-centered speakers received higher ratings from the targets.
The research team then shifted their focus to written communication for the next three experiments. They recruited hundreds of adults through an online platform to write short, persuasive essays. They asked these writers to argue about the relationship between individuals and groups.
In one experiment, all participants argued that the individual is more important than the group. In another, some writers were randomly assigned to argue the exact opposite point. In the final experiment, the researchers told half of the writers that they were competing for a cash prize to see if competition motivated them to write better essays.
During the written experiments, the online participants were given at least eight minutes to complete their essays. They were allowed to take as much time as they needed to finish their writing. The researchers tracked how long each person spent typing to see if self-centered individuals put more effort into their arguments.
They found that highly self-centered individuals did not spend any extra time writing or revising their essays. They typed for the exact same amount of time as the other participants. They also produced essays of the same average length as everyone else.
Just like in the first experiment, the writers filled out personality questionnaires and rated their own work. Then, new groups of targets read the essays and rated how convincing the written arguments were.
Despite putting in a completely average amount of effort, the self-centered writers confidently predicted that their essays would easily persuade the readers. This time, the targets strongly disagreed.
Across all three writing experiments, targets rated the essays produced by highly self-centered individuals as less persuasive than the essays written by others. The essay topic did not change this outcome. Adding a competitive cash prize also did not produce a statistically significant improvement in their ratings.
The researchers analyzed the difference between a person’s self-confidence and their actual performance. They found that this gap was massive for the highly self-centered writers. While they thought they were crafting brilliant arguments, the readers found their writing to be unimpressive and unconvincing.
When readers evaluated the essays, they were likely looking for logical coherence and clear reasoning. Without the benefit of a speaker’s vocal enthusiasm or physical presence, the weak points in the arguments became incredibly obvious.
The researchers suspected that these writers failed to consider their audience. Because highly self-centered individuals often rely on their natural charm, they might neglect to develop the logical reasoning skills needed for writing. Without a physical presence to charm the reader, their arguments simply fell apart.
While these experiments provide a clear proof of concept, the researchers acknowledged a few limitations in their work. The studies used different populations and different topics for the spoken and written experiments. The college students spoke about university life, while the online adults wrote about abstract social concepts.
Because the methods were not identical, the researchers could not make perfectly direct comparisons between the two forms of communication. They suggest that future studies should have the same participants give speeches and write essays on the exact same topic. This setup would provide a much clearer picture of how communication style affects persuasion.
The team also pointed out that they only measured how convincing the targets thought the messages were. They did not measure whether the targets actually changed their personal beliefs or attitudes after listening or reading. Future experiments could track real shifts in opinion to see if these self-centered individuals can actually change minds.
Additionally, the targets who evaluated the speeches were relatively young college students. These young targets might have viewed the extreme confidence of the speakers as a sign of high social status. The researchers suggested that testing older adults might produce different reactions to the speeches.
Finally, the researchers suggested exploring how these personality types handle defending unpopular opinions. Highly self-centered individuals are prone to exaggeration and bending the truth. Testing how they use these tactics could reveal even more about the limits of their persuasive abilities.
The study, “Silver tongues, plastic pens: modality-dependent persuasiveness in narcissists,” was authored by Joshua D. Foster, Joost M. Leunissen, Barbara Nevicka, and Constantine Sedikides.