Researchers measured narcissism in 45,000 people across 53 countries and found the same pattern everywhere. Young men consistently score highest, and the gap widens in certain types of societies.
The psychology of narcissism has a geography problem. The overwhelming majority of research on the trait has been conducted in the United States, Western Europe, or Australia. The implicit assumption built into that literature is that what holds in those contexts generalizes everywhere else, and that the cultural values of individualistic societies, with their emphasis on personal achievement, uniqueness, and self-promotion, are what drive narcissism to the levels researchers have documented.
A new study published in Self and Identity, conducted by researchers at Michigan State University, Washington University in St. Louis, Indiana University, and collaborating institutions, has tested those assumptions against the largest cross-cultural dataset ever assembled for this purpose.
The team gathered narcissism data from 45,000 people across 53 countries, spanning North and South America, Europe, Africa, the Middle East, South and East Asia, and Oceania. Rather than measuring narcissism as a single trait, they used the Narcissistic Admiration and Rivalry Concept, a framework that distinguishes two distinct components: admiration-seeking, which involves self-promotion and the desire to stand out, and rivalry, which involves putting others down to maintain a superior self-view. This distinction matters because the two components do not always move together and may respond differently to cultural and demographic influences.
The demographic patterns that emerged were striking in their consistency. Younger adults scored higher than older adults on narcissism in virtually every country studied. Men scored higher than women across almost all regions. People who perceived themselves as having higher social status scored higher than those who saw themselves as lower-status. These patterns held whether the researchers were looking at data from Germany or Nepal, from Ireland or Iraq, from the United States or South Korea.
“Being young nearly everywhere involves focusing on yourself and thinking you’re better than you are,” said lead author William Chopik. “But life can be a humbling experience, and it seems to humble people in a similar way across cultures.”
What failed to reduce narcissism
The finding that challenges the most deeply held assumption in the field concerns individualism and collectivism, the cultural dimension that psychologists have most often invoked to explain cross-cultural differences in self-focused personality traits.
Individualism captures the degree to which a culture emphasizes personal goals, autonomy, and self-expression over group loyalty and interdependence. Collectivism is its counterpart: cultures in which group harmony, shared identity, and obligations to family and community take precedence over individual achievement. The standard prediction, based on decades of cultural psychology research, is that individualistic cultures should produce higher narcissism because they reward self-promotion and uniqueness, while collectivistic cultures should suppress it because they penalize excessive self-focus.
The data did not support this prediction. The relationship between a country’s score on the individualism-collectivism dimension and its average level of narcissism was essentially null. Countries with strongly collectivistic orientations, where group harmony and interdependence are culturally central values, showed the same average narcissism levels and the same demographic patterns within their populations as individualistic ones.
“Even cultures we may consider to be group-oriented don’t necessarily suppress self-focused behaviors,” said co-author Macy Miscikowski. “Insights like these encourage us to think about the balance between cultural and biological influences on personality.”
The implication is significant. If collectivistic values do not reduce narcissism, the standard cultural explanation for who becomes narcissistic, and why, needs revision. Something else is driving the consistent demographic patterns observed across 53 countries, and it is not whether a society tells people to prioritize themselves or their group.
What does predict the size of the gaps
While individualism did not predict average narcissism levels, it did predict something more specific: the size of the gender gap in narcissism. In more individualistic countries, the difference in narcissism between men and women was somewhat larger than in collectivistic ones. This suggests that individualistic cultural norms may amplify gender differences in narcissism even when they do not elevate the overall level.
The factor that most consistently predicted the magnitude of demographic gaps across all three dimensions studied, age, gender, and perceived status, was national wealth, measured by GDP per capita.
In wealthier countries, the narcissism gap between younger and older adults was larger. Young people in high-GDP countries scored more distinctly higher than their older counterparts than young people in lower-GDP countries did. The gap between men and women was also larger in wealthier societies. And the relationship between perceived social status and narcissism was stronger in higher-GDP contexts.
One interpretation the researchers offer is that wealthier societies provide more resources and opportunities that allow narcissistic tendencies to be expressed and rewarded. When economic and social mobility are available, self-promotion and rivalry strategies may be more functionally useful, potentially reinforcing narcissistic traits in the demographic groups most likely to deploy them. In lower-GDP contexts, where resources are scarcer and survival depends more on cooperation within fixed social structures, the expression of narcissistic tendencies may be less situationally reinforced even if the underlying trait is present.
This is an interpretive hypothesis rather than a finding the study can confirm directly. What it does establish is the empirical pattern: national wealth, not cultural individualism, is the better predictor of how strongly narcissism tracks demographic lines within a society.
Which countries scored highest and lowest
The country-level rankings produced by the study directly contradict the assumption that narcissism is primarily an American or Western phenomenon.
The five countries with the highest overall narcissism scores were Germany, Iraq, China, Nepal, and South Korea. The United States came in at 16th. The five countries with the lowest narcissism scores were Serbia, Ireland, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, and Denmark.
This pattern is difficult to explain through either individualism or wealth alone. Germany and the Netherlands are both high-income, relatively individualistic societies, yet they sit at opposite ends of the narcissism distribution. Iraq and Nepal rank high despite being lower-income and more collectivistic by standard cultural metrics. Serbia and Ireland rank low despite having different economic and cultural profiles from each other.
The researchers note that country-level averages in cross-cultural psychology studies reflect many factors that remain unmeasured, including historical experiences, specific socialization practices, how representative the sample was of the broader national population, and differences in how people from different cultures interpret and respond to survey items about self-focused traits. The country rankings should be understood as describing patterns in the current dataset rather than as definitive national profiles.
Why the age pattern matters most
Across all the findings in the study, the age effect is the most consistent and the most theoretically meaningful. In every region and cultural context studied, younger adults showed higher narcissism than older adults. The pattern was not driven by a few outlier countries. It held everywhere.
Two explanations have been proposed in prior research. The first is developmental: people genuinely become less narcissistic as they age, as life experience, relationship maintenance, and the natural humbling effects of failure and loss gradually reduce self-focused tendencies. On this account, the age difference reflects real within-person change over time.
The second explanation is generational: each successive cohort is slightly more narcissistic than previous ones due to cultural and media changes, so younger cohorts show higher scores not because they will decrease with age but because they started higher. Disentangling these explanations requires longitudinal data that tracks the same people across decades, which this cross-sectional study cannot provide.
What the global consistency of the age pattern does suggest is that whatever is producing it operates across very different cultural and economic contexts. A purely Western media-driven explanation for rising youth narcissism cannot account for the same pattern appearing in Nepal, South Korea, Iraq, and Ireland simultaneously. Some combination of developmental and social factors appears to be producing a remarkably similar result in every society studied.
“Most of what we know about narcissism comes from studies conducted in the United States or a small handful of Western countries,” Chopik said. “We wanted to address that gap by examining narcissism across 53 countries and asking not only whether levels differ across cultures, but whether the same demographic patterns hold up around the world.”
They do. And the fact that they do, across societies as economically and culturally different as Germany and Nepal, Ireland and South Korea, suggests that the most fundamental drivers of narcissism, age, gender, and perceived status, operate through mechanisms that transcend the cultural differences psychologists have long assumed were decisive.
What the study does not establish
The study relied on self-reported narcissism, which introduces the possibility that cultural norms around self-disclosure and modesty affect how willingly people acknowledge self-focused traits on a survey. Cultures in which humility is strongly valued may produce lower scores not because people are actually less narcissistic but because they are more reluctant to endorse self-aggrandizing statements on a questionnaire. The researchers acknowledge this limitation and note that it may account for some of the country-level variation observed.
The sample was not randomly drawn from national populations. Participants were recruited through research networks, online platforms, and university settings, which typically oversample educated, internet-connected adults. Whether the patterns observed would replicate in more representative national samples, particularly in lower-income countries where internet access and survey participation are less uniform, remains an open question.
The study also cannot establish causation. It documents demographic patterns in narcissism across cultures but cannot identify the specific mechanisms through which age, gender, wealth, or cultural orientation produce those patterns. That work requires longitudinal studies, experimental designs, and more granular cultural data than a cross-sectional survey can provide.
What the study offers, at a scale that no previous cross-cultural narcissism research has approached, is a map. Across 53 countries and 45,000 people, the same demographic fingerprint appears in the data: young men who see themselves as high-status, in every society studied, show the highest narcissism. Life experience reduces it. And the societies where that reduction is largest are not the individualistic ones psychologists expected, but the wealthier ones that provide more resources for narcissistic strategies to be expressed and rewarded.
The study, “Cultural moderation of demographic differences in narcissism”, was authored by Macy M. Miscikowski, Rebekka Weidmann, Sara H. Konrath, and William J. Chopik, and published in Self and Identity in 2025.
Source: Michigan State University. DOI: 10.1080/15298868.2025.2593298
