Here’s how to recognize it and cope with the narcissist in your life.
If you’re hoping that the narcissist in your life will change, a new study suggests that you may have to wait a very long time. And even then, you might see only a small difference.
The research, which was published in the journal Psychological Bulletin on Thursday, analyzed 51 studies with more than 37,000 participants — mostly from North America, Europe and New Zealand — to explore how narcissism changes over a person’s life span.
Although the researchers found that, on average, narcissism gradually declined as people aged, “the results show that this decline is not as large as one might hope,” said Ulrich Orth, the lead author of the paper and a professor of developmental psychology at the University of Bern in Switzerland.
The declines in narcissism took place over the span of decades.
“When you look back at how a close friend behaved 20 or 30 years earlier, you might notice the change,” Dr. Orth said. “Still, the average decline was at most of moderate size, so you wouldn’t expect that people’s level of narcissism changes fundamentally.”
The study also found that if people had higher levels of narcissism than others when they were children, then this was also usually true when they reached adulthood.
The research featured subjects who were mostly white and lived in Western cultures, and a number of the studies included in the analysis had low numbers of adults who were 65 or older, all of which makes it difficult to generalize the results.