Entering adulthood in a recession tempers later narcissism: But only in men

Abstract

In a recent study, Bianchi (2014) showed that macroeconomic conditions (i.e. average unemployment rate) during the years of emerging adulthood (ages 18-25) are inversely related to adult narcissism. Fletcher (2015) called into question the robustness of the results and Grijalva et al. (2015) presented meta-analytic support for real gender differences in narcissism. Here we report combined results from five studies (N = 11,394) showing that the average unemployment rate during emerging adulthood indeed tempers later narcissism - but only in men.