Why a Narcissist May Forget Your Name

When you meet someone for the first time, you might try mightily to register the connection between their name and face, especially if you think you’ll see them again.

Most people try to come up with a trick to help lock into place the name-face correspondence so they won’t come up short at a future meeting. Someone named “Joy” might have a nice smile, or a “Bill” might have a larger nose. In advice dating back to 1995, a Los Angeles Times article suggested these strategies: “When meeting people, turn your attention away from everything else and concentrate on any outstanding facial features, using it to connect with the name.”

Not everyone is willing or able to go through this effort. You may have a recently-acquired in-law who you’ve noticed calls, someone they should know reasonably well by the wrong name. Perhaps you’ve been the target of this somewhat cruel social forgetting. It’s annoying when a colleague, acquaintance, neighbor, or in-law constantly asks you to repeat your name. “I’m so sorry,” they may say, “I’m just bad at putting names to faces.” “Sorry?” you ask yourself. “If you’re so sorry, why don’t you just try a little harder?” You might feel a bit miffed that you fall into that category of insignificant people whom that person doesn’t bother to try to get to know better.

According to MacEwan University’s Miranda Giacomin and colleagues (2021), the people who say they’re poor at putting together names and faces will have more difficulty "navigating social interactions and fostering successful interpersonal relationships.” After all, they observed, “everyone’s face is unique and reflects their life experiences.” When someone doesn’t remember you, you feel that there’s nothing really that special about you.

As Giacomin et al. proposed, the problem isn’t that you lack some special quality, but that the person who forgets your name is the one to worry about. That person, they hypothesized, is likely to be high in narcissistic qualities. If, as the Los Angeles Times article suggested, you need to “turn attention away from everything else” to remember a name, this means turning attention away from themselves.

The Poorer Memory of Narcissists

Summarizing previous literature, Giacomin et al. noted that the grandiosity which characterizes narcissists influences what they remember, in that they “selectively attend to positive self-relevant information that is ego-affirming … their lack of concern for other people tends to make them worse at processing information about others.”

Although one might argue that narcissistic people may regard becoming an expert at facial memory as a way to advance socially, if they have this attentional deficit, that desire will paradoxically become thwarted by their excessive self-focus.

Giacomin and her fellow researchers began their investigation with a series of online experiments. They tested recognition memory not just for faces but also for nonsocial stimuli, including a range of objects such as telephones and houses.

In one experiment, the authors added cars as stimuli to see if perhaps narcissists would pay more attention to these symbols of material success, known to appeal in general to people high in grandiosity. Even so, people high in narcissism showed consistent recognition memory problems across the board. These findings indicated that there’s nothing particularly special about the poor facial memory of people high in narcissism because they may struggle to process new information in the first place.

What Do Narcissists Remember?

If they’re unable to succeed at a simple memory task, facial or not, the authors wondered whether they could tap into the attentional processes that lead narcissists to be oblivious to the stimuli around them. To tackle this question, Giacomin et al. devised an intriguing experiment that presented participants with a chance to look at themselves on a webcam while processing cognitive information presented by someone else on the screen. The authors reasoned, “A strong self-focus, including attention to one’s appearance, is a defining feature of narcissism.”

In their fourth and final study, the authors constructed an in-person experiment in which participants watched an online lecture while they could also see their faces on the screen (much as a Zoom call). The research team tested memory for the lecture's content and watched the eye movements of participants as they peered at the screen.

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You can undoubtedly relate to this setup based on your own experience with video calling when your face stares back at you. You can either ponder it or pay attention to what everyone else is doing and saying. You’ve probably also noticed that some participants in these calls constantly seem to fix their hair or try to tidy up their appearance, making you wonder how much they're actually listening to what others are saying.

The 187 undergraduate students (63 percent women, average age 20 years old) in this experiment believed they were being asked to provide data on the use of technology in education, so they had no idea about the study's actual purpose. Consistent with prediction, people higher in narcissism had poorer memory for the lecture material. However, this effect was accounted for by statistically factoring into the equation the length of time participants spent studying their own faces.

This last key finding provides an important clue to the puzzle about the inability of narcissists to remember anything about other people. They simply spend all their cognitive resources attending to and thinking about themselves, draining their ability to “miss and subsequently fail to remember events occurring around them.”

Adding to their cognitive deficit, the researchers maintained that a lack of empathy impairs the socioemotional functioning of the highly narcissistic. These individuals may not like it when someone else doesn’t remember their name but not be able to put themselves in the places of the people who they've treated in this seemingly dismissive manner.

How to Respond When a Narcissist Seems to Forget Who You Are

The Giacomin et al. study provides a clear picture of what goes wrong when a narcissist, perhaps that person you know, seems to have trouble recalling you from one occasion to another. They can’t pay that much attention to you “because they see the world through a self-focused lens.” Rather than feel personally attacked, you can take solace because it truly isn’t “personal.”

For people high in narcissism, it’s possible that they can force themselves to learn the names of other people or remember events important to others but not to them under some circumstances. They may put forth a valiant effort if they think it will help them get ahead. However, suppose they’re simultaneously thinking about whether they’re achieving their intended goals. In that case, this self-focus will continue to get in the way, leading them to defeat themselves at their own game.

Finally, you may be a person who has trouble associating names with faces for reasons having nothing to do with narcissism. Names may fly out of your head the minute you meet new people because you feel anxious or concerned about the impression that you're making on others. The Giacomin study, in this respect, reinforces the well-known principle in cognitive psychology that to remember something, you have to pay attention to it in the first place.

To sum up, knowing that people high in narcissism have poor memories may not help you feel better about them, but it can help you feel better about yourself.

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