Narcissism and Self-Insight: A Review and Meta-Analysis of Narcissists’ Self-Enhancement Tendencies

The current article reviews the narcissism–self-enhancement literature using a multilevel meta-analytic technique. Specifically, we focus on self-insight self-enhancement (i.e., whether narcissists perceive themselves more positively than they are perceived by others); thus, we only include studies that compare narcissists’ self-reports to observer reports or objective measures. Results from 171 correlations reported in 36 empirical studies (N = 6,423) revealed that the narcissism–self-enhancement relationship corrected for unreliability in narcissism was.21 (95% confidence interval [CI] = [.17,.25]), and that narcissists tend to self-enhance their agentic characteristics more than their communal characteristics. The average corrected relationship between narcissism and self-enhancement for agentic characteristics was.29 (95% CI = [.25,.33]), whereas for communal characteristics it was.05 (95% CI = [−.01,.10]). In addition, we individually summarized narcissists’ self-enhancement for 10 different constructs (i.e., the Big Five, task performance, intelligence, leadership, attractiveness, and likeability).