title: Narcissism and the use of personal pronouns revisited.
abstract: [Correction Notice: An Erratum for this article was reported in Vol 109(3) of Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (see record 2015-37773-002). The authors erroneously reported the overall correlation, first stated in the abstract, between Narcissism and total first-person-singular use as .02 (.017) instead of .01 (.010). The misreporting of the overall correlation between Narcissism and total use of first-person singular does not change the results or interpretation in any way (i.e., the near-zero association between Narcissism and I-talk). The online version of this article has been corrected.] Among both laypersons and researchers, extensive use of first-person singular pronouns (i.e., I-talk) is considered a face-valid linguistic marker of narcissism. However, the assumed relation between narcissism and I-talk has yet to be subjected to a strong empirical test. Accordingly, we conducted a large-scale (N = 4,811), multisite (5 labs), multimeasure (5 narcissism measures) and dual-language (English and German) investigation to quantify how strongly narcissism is related to using more first-person singular pronouns across different theoretically relevant communication contexts (identity-related, personal, impersonal, private, public, and stream-of-consciousness tasks). Overall (r = .02, 95% CI [-.02, .04]) and within the sampled contexts, narcissism was unrelated to use of first-person singular pronouns (total, subjective, objective, and possessive). This consistent near-zero effect has important implications for making inferences about narcissism from pronoun use and prompts questions about why I-talk tends to be strongly perceived as an indicator of narcissism in the absence of an underlying actual association between the 2 variables. (PsycINFO Database Record
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology.
authors.forename: Angela L
authors.initials: AL
authors.lastname: Carey
authors.affiliation: Department of Marketing, Stanford University.
authors.forename: Melanie S
authors.initials: MS
authors.lastname: Brucks
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, University of Münster.
authors.forename: Albrecht C P
authors.initials: AC
authors.lastname: Küfner
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, Georgia Southern University.
authors.forename: Nicholas S
authors.initials: NS
authors.lastname: Holtzman
authors.affiliation: Department of Education and Psychology, Free University of Berlin.
authors.forename: Fenne
authors.initials: F
authors.lastname: Große Deters
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, University of Münster.
authors.forename: Mitja D
authors.initials: MD
authors.lastname: Back
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, Texas A&M University.
authors.forename: M Brent
authors.initials: MB
authors.lastname: Donnellan
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, University of Texas at Austin.
authors.forename: James W
authors.initials: JW
authors.lastname: Pennebaker
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology.
authors.forename: Matthias R
authors.initials: MR
authors.lastname: Mehl
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D009289:Narcissism; D010551:Personality; D014705:Verbal Behavior; D055815:Young Adult