People with high levels of hostile narcissism - a trait that makes a person prone to manipulation, aggression and thrill-seeking - are more often willing to support illegal and violent political actions. This applies to both sides of the American abortion debate. These are the findings of a new study published in the journal Current Psychology.
Psychologists Ann Crispens and Alex Bertrams of the University of Bern (Switzerland) put forward an idea they called the dark ego-transport principle. According to it, some people with socially unpleasant character traits join noble-looking movements not because they genuinely care about the issue, but because the movement serves as a convenient vehicle for satisfying their own selfish needs - for example, for aggression or thrills.
Hostile narcissism is essentially the core of narcissism, characterized by arrogance, manipulativeness, a sense of superiority, a lack of empathy (the ability to understand others' feelings) and outbursts of anger in response to criticism. It is not the same as a charming extroverted leader or an anxious, vulnerable narcissist.
The study involved 872 American adults recruited through an online platform. The average age was 43. Of them, 501 people (57.5%) identified themselves as supporters of the right to abortion (pro-choice), and 371 (42.5%) as opponents of abortion (pro-life). Participants completed a 60-item questionnaire assessing different types of narcissism, and also indicated how willing they were to take part in legal peaceful actions and in illegal violent actions.
On average, people were more inclined toward peaceful actions (4.12 points out of 7) than toward radical ones (2.26 out of 7). The average level of hostile narcissism was not high - 2.07 out of 5. At the same time, supporters and opponents of abortion did not differ statistically significantly on this measure.
The main result: the higher the hostile narcissism, the stronger the person's willingness to support illegal and violent actions related to abortion. This link is a correlation, that is, a statistical association that by itself does not prove that narcissism causes radicalization. The association persisted even after accounting for age, sex, altruism and other types of narcissism.
An interesting detail: among supporters of the right to abortion, willingness toward radical actions grew linearly with increasing narcissism. Among opponents of abortion, the relationship turned out to be U-shaped: at low and medium levels of narcissism, radical intentions were lower than among supporters, but at very high levels they jumped sharply. However, this curved nature of the relationship was obtained in an additional, exploratory analysis and requires cautious interpretation.
The authors emphasize: the results do not mean that any position on abortion is itself radical or narcissistic. Altruism was also linked to willingness to take part in actions - that is, people join the movement both to defend women's rights and to defend unborn children. In addition, the study relied on self-reports at a single point in time, so it cannot prove causation and does not reflect real behavior.