When Failure Is Imminent, What Happens to the Narcissist?

Coming to grips with your own limitations is never very pleasant. However, some people are able to bounce back without too much difficulty. You’ve undoubtedly had the experience of not getting the promotion or raise you desire, not being invited to a friend’s birthday party, or just being ignored instead of complimented for your new outfit. With disappointment comes rationalization. Everyone can think of reasons other than to attribute the outcome to their own failings, but eventually, most people face the hard truth. Not so for a narcissist, though.

When people high in narcissism must confront failure, they can feel the pain penetrate their very soul. Dependent on constant admiration and the need to succeed, they simply cannot stand to seem weak or flawed. The question is, what will they do next? How can they rationalize failure when all they seek is success?

The Role of Personality in Self-Protection

According to Witten/Herdecke University’s Christoph Heine and colleagues (2026), negative feedback serves to contradict a person’s “valued self-conception.” This, in turn, triggers the “self-protection motive.” In the case of failing to pass a test or receive a promotion, the self-protection motive can lead people to question the validity of the evaluation itself and the competence of the person providing the feedback. They can even twist the feedback’s interpretation from negative to positive. Alternatively, they can take the classic strategy of taking credit for whatever success they do achieve and blaming their failures on external factors.

Social psychology tends to look at these outcomes as more or less universal without considering why some people may be more likely to avoid internalizing failure than others. The Witten/Herdecke researchers believed that individual differences do matter. One of these important differences can be traced to self-esteem, with people higher in self-esteem better able to weather a threat to the self. Narcissism, the grandiose variety, is the second protective factor. The grandiose narcissist seeks admiration with a vengeance, and when it is lacking, will do everything possible to contort the outcome toward those self-protective interpretations.

Taking self-threats more in stride should be, argue the authors, more likely for people who don’t need constant self-affirmation. These individuals can be thought of as high in “self-assessment motive (SIM),” which leads them to seek honest feedback so they can improve. Mindfulness can be the other saving grace. When you’re in a mindful state, you can accept failure without being devastated by it. Those who tend to be high in the quality can “experience aversive thoughts and emotions following negative feedback as temporary events that require no direct response.”

Testing the Narcissistic Self-Protective Mode

To find out how these four individual differences might impact responses to self-threats, Heine et al. asked their 1,744 participants to complete a test that would provide negative or positive feedback, depending on the experimental condition. The test is one used in studies of empathy in which the participant must decide which emotion is being expressed in a photo showing only a person’s eyes (the “Reading of the Mind in the Eyes” test). Those who thought they failed received feedback indicating they were only better than 20 percent of the validation sample of the test. Those led to believe they succeeded received feedback stating that they exceeded 80 percent of the validation sample.

To assess responses to self-threat, the authors asked participants to evaluate whether the test validly assessed social sensitivity. Participants also rated the competence of the researcher as well as the validity of the concept of social sensitivity. The research team assessed individual differences in the four proposed personality variables with standard measurement instruments. They also zeroed in on grandiose narcissism with respect to social sensitivity, with items such as “I am the most helpful person I know.” This assessment was considered important to ensure that the quality of social sensitivity was indeed relevant to the participant’s self-esteem.

The findings showed that people high in grandiose narcissism, particularly the need for admiration, were indeed more likely to engage in self-protective interpretations of failure. They were particularly likely to devalue the test’s validity, particularly if their narcissism revolved around their social sensitivity.

People high in SIM and mindfulness weren’t completely off the hook, though, when it came to self-protection. They showed a tendency to devalue the researcher’s competence as well as the importance of social sensitivity. As the authors concluded, “Our results highlight that balancing self-esteem maintenance with incorporating negative feedback likely is a challenging task for many people.”

Narcissism Essential Reads

The Hidden Cost of Chronic Narcissistic Abuse

Is There Truly an Epidemic of Narcissism?

Turning Your Failures Into Self-Understanding

These findings show that narcissists indeed tend to berate those who point out their limitations. But they are apparently not alone when it comes to the need to engage in self-protection. People who seek feedback may not want to learn the truth, and those who seem able to accept disappointments, similarly, may find the truth to be a tough pill to swallow.

Even though the current findings put narcissism in the same category as other sources of individual differences, the fact remains that narcissism doesn’t usually show up as a single, solitary trait. The desire for self-evaluation that some people seem to have can come with the proviso that the information bolsters their sense of worth. Similarly, being tuned into the ups and downs of your daily existence doesn’t mean that you’ll roll with every punch that confronts you.

To sum up, if there is a lesson to be learned from the Heine et al. study, it is that looking inward rather than outward can be an adaptive way to move forward from adversity. Letting your defenses down so you can see your shortcomings in a realistic light can become the path toward a more fulfilling sense of self-awareness.