A few years ago, S. Mark Young, a communications and business professor at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles, and Drew Pinsky, doctor and TV personality, teamed up to tackle the question. They used the Narcissistic Personality Inventory (NPI)—a 40-point questionnaire developed by two University of California, Berkeley professors to assess traits attributed to narcissism such as exhibitionism, exploitativeness, superiority, and vanity—to measure 200 celebrities from Pinsky’s radio show, LoveLine. Reality TV stars scored highest, followed by comedians, actors, and musicians, in that order—all clocking in higher than the average person. Young and Pinsky found that the length of years in the limelight did not correlate with score. They theorized that being famous does not cause narcissism, but rather attracts it. (Otherwise, the longer a person spent in the limelight, the higher she’d score.) Reality TV, they concluded, lets people with “limited abilities believe that they can succeed in the entertainment industry.” The study’s point is not that individuals with narrow thespian skills like Kim Kardashian and Honey Boo Boo do succeed, but rather that selfish, self-aggrandizing, vain people, aka narcissists, are over-represented on TV and social media —because they love drama, perform well in public, and obsessively groom their image.
Posted on: Tue, 24 Sep 2013 06:28:14 +0000
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