An interview
We recently chatted with Sabrina Mayer, whose article titled, “The Two Dimensions of Narcissistic Personality and Support for the Radical Right: The Role of Right‐wing Authoritarianism, Social Dominance Orientation and Anti‐immigrant Sentiment”, is to be published in an upcoming issue of EJP. Sabrina is currently Head of the Data and Methods research group at the DeZIM institute, Germany.
Read on to learn more about her work on narcissism and voting behavior!
Q: Hi Sabrina! Can you tell us a bit about how you became interested in personality psychology?
This is an interesting point. I would say I'm a social scientist working in the field of political psychology – which is where political science and psychology meet. I have a master in political science and computer science, and a PhD in political science. So, you see I'm actually not a psychologist, but I do work in the field.
My work is based on the interplay between political phenomena and psychological theories. I usually start by looking at electoral behavior, for instance, "Hey, there are a lot of people that vote for radical right wing parties. What makes them do so?" I use psychological concepts to understand questions like this. Usually I work more with social identity and other social psychological concepts. But, now that I’ve learned more about and done work in personality psychology, I think it's quite likely that I’ll stay in the field. Because well, when you are new to a field, there are a lot of costs – that is, you have to read a lot of literature and become familiar with concepts you may not know – and now I think it will probably get a lot easier.
Q: What was the specific decision process for studying narcissistic personality in relation to support for the radical right?
I think there is a lot of literature now on electoral behavior, especially on voting for right populist parties. But usually these studies focus on short-term features, like how do threat perceptions (e.g., cultural threat, economic threat, status threat) affect voting. However, I think that, of course, a lot is also affected by predispositions. And I think there's not that much on predispositions and how they affect support [for right-wing parties]. And if there is research, usually it focuses on constructs like the Big Five or collective narcissism.
This project started 3 years ago, when I had a look at the GESIS panel – which is a representative survey of the German population. The GESIS panel allows researchers to apply to include their measures into the study. Some other researchers, such as Mitja Back, have been able to include a questionnaire that is based on the NARC model into the study. I ran across the items and thought it sounded interesting. Narcissism is pretty much everywhere. For example, people talk about Donald Trump as being a narcissist. Everybody has some sort of name and understanding of what narcissism is about, so it was quite interesting to look at it from a scientific point of view, using a validated scale. I started to read about narcissism and the dual pathway idea the NARC model proposes with regard to narcissistic rivalry and admiration. These two trait dimensions are based on two different social strategies to maintain the grandiose self through a set of distinct affective, cognitive and behavioural dynamics. Narcissistic admiration, the adaptive pathway, refers to the process of assertive self‐promotion by seeking social admiration. Narcissistic rivalry, the maladjusted pathway, is characterised by antagonistic orientations to protect oneself from a negative self‐view.
We used the GESIS panel data set along with data concerning people’s voting intentions for the AfD [Alternative für Deutschland; German right wing populist party] in 2016. We reasoned that there is probably a mediation process going on between personality and vote choice. We thought that although there might not be a direct effect of personality on vote choice, it could be mediated by three major attitudinal constructs: rightwing authoritarianism, social dominance orientation, and anti-immigrant sentiment.
We found that there was indeed an indirect relationship, and that anti-immigrant sentiment was the most powerful mediator, which could also be expected from what we know about German politics and the impact of the refugee crisis. As such, the present project was titled, "The dark side of the dark side", because it actually makes sense to think that people who have high levels of narcissistic rivalry are also more prone to vote for the AfD, because they share a similar perception of others and how outsiders are to be treated.
Most interestingly, we also found that narcissistic admiration actually protects from AfD support. So, there's a negative relationship between admiration and support for the AfD, but on the other side we found a positive relationship between a levels of narcissistic rivalry and AfD support.
Q: What would you say are the biggest implications for research and practice?
For the public, our findings show that there's a general part of the electorate that is prone or susceptible for appeals from radical right wing parties, due to their predispositions. This is because some people have an inherent need to improve their own value by devaluating others. Short-term factors such as candidate evaluations, issue orientations, or threat perceptions may change rapidly and thus lead to changes in vote choice, but these predispositions are stable and those people can be activated by those parties.
For research, you have to consider the dimensionality of your constructs and not rely on scales that suppress those dimensions or mix them together. Otherwise the effects get blurred, as would have happened if we treated narcissism as unidimensional in this study. Additionally, if you analyze personality and vote choice, you have to use indirect models (i.e., mediation). Moreover,I think it's a quite complex mechanism that connects narcissistic rivalry to all those mediators. This study was probably just a starting point and the topic needs a lot more research.
Q: You have also recently started a new job, congratulations! What else is next for you?
Thank you! Right now I have started at a research institute that focuses on immigrants. So, this is quite complimentary because AfD voters have immigration as their major topic but I also look at immigrants as voters – because interestingly some of them also have a tendency to vote for right populist parties.
In the future, I would love to work more on this topic because usually I work on the topic of identity and I think it would be nice to explore how narcissistic personality and national identity perceptions go together in the explanation of support for radical right wing populist parties.
In addition, I submitted my "Habilitation" recently – it's like a second PhD dissertation at the end of the post-doc that we have in Germany. Right now, I'm just waiting for the finalization of the process and then I'll have to see where it leads me.
Q: Do you have any tips or advice for young scholars?
I think it's important that you are interested in what you do, because you have to do a lot of work, and if you're not interested it's quite hard to maintain your pace until the end.
In addition, if we use this study as an example, I think it's always important to pick your team. I was reading about narcissism at first and thought it would be interesting to study in relation to voting behavior. Then I asked two colleagues I know that also work in the field if they wanted to participate. Usually it's more fun and easier to work on something together, because everyone has their own strengths and weaknesses. We also had our own feedback team; we asked a psychologist, a political scientist expert, and somebody who already worked on personality and right-wing populist vote choice for feedback after we finished the first draft. A lot of points that the reviewers would have raised were already raised by them, so that already helped us improve the draft and made it easier to eventually get it published somewhere.
Do something that interests you, pick people you want to work with (if you are allowed to pick people), and also do your research. When we decided to do a paper in personality psychology, we went through the journals and looked which journals might be interested because they published something similar. Then, we wrote to the editor of EJP asking, "Hey we have this study, but we are not psychologists, would you still be interested because we don't have like five samples but we have just one representative sample?" And they said, "Oh yeah. If it's a good manuscript, we will consider it." So, just do your research and look at how other papers in the field are structured before writing your paper. It saves you a lot of time.
Finally, and something I would also tell myself if I could go back in time, is that it's also important to not only do the stuff that interests you but to try and have some sort of red thread in your work. In Germany, a lot of professorships are connected to specific subjects. There are actually no professorships on political psychology which I did know in the beginning, but I didn't care back then. Now I realize it’s probably easier if you try to make yourself more marketable. For instance, if you say, "Okay, I'm doing political psychology but I'm also going to do comparative stuff, so I can also apply to comparative professorships." If I could go back again, I would try to be more strategic.