A Way to Curb the Egos of People Who Think They're Special
People convinced of their own greatness aren't necessarily narcissists even though they may seem very similar.
New research suggests that a specific type of thought process can lead people to have overblown ideas of their own importance.
Gradually interjecting a dose of reality into their thoughts about themselves can help bring the overly grandiose back down to earth.
The late Alex Trebek, known for his dry wit, once offered this advice: “Take your job seriously, but don't take yourself too seriously.” You can probably think of people you know who could benefit from this particular piece of wisdom. They are so convinced of their own superiority that they insist on having their own way, offer unsolicited advice, and let you know in no uncertain terms that you couldn't possibly measure up to their level of success. They're not particularly manipulative or insensitive to others, so you wouldn’t consider them to be high on narcissism. The only problem you have with them is their excessive and often insufferable grandiosity.
Injecting a dose of reality into the grandiosity of these people convinced of their own self-importance may seem like a daunting task. Indeed, anytime you’ve tried to poke fun at them to get them to look at themselves less seriously, a la Trebek, all you get back for your efforts is a withering scowl. What, then, can you do to get them to rein their overly expansive view of themselves?
The Type of Thinking that Can Lead to all That Self-Importance.
To begin with, it can be helpful to understand where that grandiosity comes from. In a newly published paper, University of Grenoble Alpes psychologist Catherine Bortolon and CHU de Montpelier’s Stéphane Raffard (2021) suggest the source of a self-inflated ego lies in a specific type of rumination, or the tendency to focus on your own thoughts. If you’ve ever found yourself deep in the midst of reliving over and over again a particular moment in time, then you know what it’s like to engage in rumination.
Bortolon and Raffard, citing previous research, note that chronic absorption in an individual’s own thoughts could constitute part of a “transdiagnostic” psychological process present in more than one clinical disorder. Theorized to be a key component of depressive disorders, a ruminative style takes the form of a tendency to engage in negative thinking about “the causes and consequences of a psychological state.” However, the French authors maintain that rumination can also have a positively-focused quality and can even help people work harder toward achieving their goals.
The productive kind of rumination, Bortolon and Raffard maintain, “may focus on either goal-attainment or discrepancies between one’s goals and current progress in order to facilitate effective self-regulation towards the goal” (p. 1). To put it more simply, this “goal progress” approach to rumination could help people ponder how well they’re doing versus how well they’d like to do in achieving their desired outcomes.
You might be able to relate to this inner experience if you’ve ever spun your mental wheels as you try to solve a particularly complex problem. Perhaps you have a craft project you’re trying to finish but to your horror, you find you’ve made a huge and possibly fatal mistake. As you work through all the possible options to salvage the project, you become so deeply involved in your own thoughts that you don’t realize that an entire afternoon has gone by. However, your solution works, so you figure it was worth the time and mental effort.
The problem that arises in this positive variant of rumination occurs not when you use it constructively, but when you allow your thoughts to drift only to the times when your efforts resulted in success. As you reflect, over and over again, on a moment when other people showered you with admiration and made you feel special, you could enter a kind of upward spiraling of thought in which you now feel invincible. Could it be, as the French researchers suggest, that grandiosity stems from this type of rumination?
Testing the Theory Linking Grandiosity to Rumination.
One way to explore the rumination-grandiosity link would be to measure both tendencies and then see if they’re statistically related to each other. However, this approach would result in the typical chicken and egg, or correlation does not equal causation, problem. Using an experimental method avoids this thorny limitation, but would require that the researchers somehow manage to flip a mental switch to turn on the grandiose self-reflection process in their participants.
As it turns out, such a method does exist. Using a design based on previous research, Bortolon and Raffard induced a state of grandiosity by asking their 109 college student participants (average age 27 years old) to “recall a past experience in which they felt special, important and/or superior to most people” (p. 3). This memory, the researchers requested, needed to be precise and specific to a given place and time (like that project you successfully completed). With this memory now primed, the research participants were asked to spend two minutes noticing what they “thought and felt at the moment.”
Having prompted participants to dwell on their moments of glory, the French researchers introduced the rumination induction condition for one of the study’s groups and a distraction condition for the other. Participants in both groups saw a series of 21 Powerpoint slides. The rumination condition included sentences that required participants to think about the causes and consequences of the situation and the way they were feeling with sentences such as “Think about the extent to which you felt special in this situation” and “Think about the extent to which you were superior or better than most people." For the distraction condition, participants were requested to focus their attention on neutral, non self-focused ideas such as “Think about a boat slowly crossing the Atlantic."
Prior to, and just after, the rumination or distraction condition, participants completed a 26-item Grandiose Thinking questionnaire with items from these 4 subscales rating each from 1 (Never) to 5 (Very often):
Inflated self- “Do you ever think you are more talented or gifted than other people?”
Fame- “Do you ever think you are someone famous, important, or powerful?”
Religiosity- “Do you ever think you are closer to God and/or the Devil than most people?”
Attraction- “Do you ever think you are more attractive than other people?”
Turning now to the findings, as the authors predicted, participants in the rumination condition indeed scored significantly more in the grandiose direction than did those in the distraction condition (using total scores only). Prior to the manipulation, all participants received comparable scores but after the manipulation, participants in the distraction condition showed a sharp decrease in their ideas of self-importance. The design, which initially prompted participants to experience themselves as special and self-important, therefore made it possible for the researchers to show that rumination kept those grandiose ideas alive in the minds of the participants.
As the authors concluded, “A ruminative style of thinking might narrow attention toward positive experiences and prevent individuals from attending to disconfirmatory evidence. This might lead to positively biased interpretations of life events, higher expectations that something positive will happen, and memory biases toward positive events” (p. 5). In other words, grandiosity perpetuates itself in people who find themselves reflecting only on times in which they shone.
How to Inject a Dose of Reality into the Self-Important People in Your Life.
Armed with these results, you can now understand the source of self-importance in people who feel so convinced of their own greatness. As they ponder their successes and accomplishments, their ruminative tendencies drown out any other “data” from experiences in which things didn’t work out so well for them. Having now peeked into what their thoughts might be, the next step for you is to see if you can interrupt that self-perpetuating chain.
You might not want to change the conversation to that slow boat crossing the Atlantic, but any shift of focus could help break the other person’s internal cycle of rumination. Talk about something, anything, as long as it isn't fodder for the individual's grandiosity. If this is a person you see often, you might eventually be able to dial up the frequency of such reality-based interactions. This approach, as the French authors suggest for clinical applications, could help the individual “develop a sense of self-esteem based on other facts than the grandiose delusions” (p. 5).
To sum up, It can be unpleasant to have people in your life who can never face up to their own limitations. It may take some time, but by interrupting their overblown self-important self-talk, you can help them see themselves in a more realistic, and fulfilling light.