Abstract

This study investigated the effect of experiencing failure on the self-esteem of both overt and covert narcissists. Out of 191 undergraduates, We selected three group by means of analyzing their results on the narcissistic personality disorder scale (NPDS) and covert narcissism scale (CNS), as follows 14 overt narcissists, 14 covert narcissists and 14 controls for a total of 42 participants. We measured participants' self-esteem before and after they experienced failure via a discrimination learning task. While the self-esteem scores of overt narcissists and controls increased, those of covert narcissists decreased after experiencing failure. By analyzing the differences among self-esteem scores before and after they experienced failure, we confirmed meaningful differences between overt narcissists and covert narcissists, and between covert narcissists and controls. The results suggest that experiencing failure can have negative effects on covert narcissists but not on overt narcissists. These results also show that overt narcissists have positive estimations of themselves and covert narcissists have negative estimations of themselves.