Concept Creep of Collective Narcissism: A Commentary on Putnam and colleagues (2018)

Putnam and colleagues (2018) examined how people estimate the contribution of their state to the overall history of the United States. Samples from all 50 states reported some degree of overestimation of the importance of their home state compared to what others said about their state (Zaromb et al., 2014; Zaromb et al., 2018). We conducted a pre-registered study in which we collected data from 539 undergraduate students. We assessed overestimation (Putnam et al., 2018), collective narcissism (Golec de Zavala et al., 2009), pathological narcissism (Pincus et al., 2009), numeracy using two different methods (Fagerlin et al., 2007; Lipkus et al., 2001), how much participants identify with their state and how meaningful it is to be from their state (to capture in-group affection/narcissism), how often they think about their home state (to capture availability), and their ACT/SAT scores. The correlations between overestimation and the traditional measure of collective narcissism (r = .18) and individual narcissism (rs < .07) were small.