Are You A Narcissist? Your Friends Might Be A Clue

If you're a narcissist looking for friends, turns out there's one particular type of person you should be looking for: other narcissists! A new study finds that narcissists are most likely to be friends with fellow narcissists — because, I guess, it's really easy to put up with someone being self-centered if you are too self-centered yourself to really notice. It all works out in the end?

In a new study published in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, researchers from Germany looked at 290 pairs of best friends and asked them to take psychological assessments designed to test for various personality traits, including good things like agreeableness and less positive things like narcissism. The researchers were hoping to see if personality traits among best friends tended to be similar among best friends. Overall, most studies have found that best friends tend to have very different personality traits. Except, it seems, when it comes to narcissists.

The researchers in Germany found that not only did people with narcissistic traits likely to be friends with someone who was similarly narcissistic, but that when two people with narcissistic traits were friends, their personalities tended to be similar in other ways, too.

"There is evidence that narcissists are even more tolerant of others’ narcissistic traits (e.g., bossy aggressive, arrogant, selfish) when they possess these characteristics themselves,” the study authors wrote. And in addition, when seeking friends they tend to try to find people who are like them in other ways, too, basically seeking out another version of themselves.

Of course, scoring high on a narcissism personality test isn't necessarily a bad thing, and isn't the same thing as being diagnosed with an actual personality disorder. Nor is it necessarily a bad thing to want to be friends with people who are similar to you. But if you find yourself mostly being friends with people whose personalities are like yours...well, you might be a little more narcissistic than you thought.

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