A six-year Wharton study suggests leaders who crave status and attention are driving the push back to the office—despite mixed evidence on productivity.
unobtrusive measures of narcissism via photo size, signature size, and relative compensation predicted greater resistance to remote work in public statements early in the COVID-19 pandemic.
Dude, come the fuck on. I take psychology as a serious science, so this methodology legitimately offends me: signature size as a metric for narcissism? Get the actual fuck out of here. This reeks of a paper in search of a conclusion.
If you actually look at the evidence presented, they cite this 2019 meta-analysis in the Journal of Management: “Making CEO Narcissism Research Great [ew]: A Review and Meta-Analysis of CEO Narcissism”. On signature size, for which it found only two studies by nearly the exact same team, it remarked:
Ham[, Seybert, and Wang] (2018) and Ham, Lang, Seybert, and Wang (2017) employed an alternative unobtrusive measure of CEO narcissism by measuring the size and contents of a CEO’s signature in SEC filings (2 of 42 articles). Their rationale posits that a larger signature represents
the grandiose nature of a narcissist. To validate the measure, Ham et al. used student samples
in a laboratory setting. While the main advantage of the measure is that it captures a behavior
under the direct control of the CEO (i.e., his or her signature), the measure may not fully
capture narcissism’s multifaceted nature. Ham et al. also provided external validation by correlating the measure with employee ratings of CEO narcissism, as obtained by O’Reilly et al.
(2014). As this is a newer measure, it has seen limited use to date.
I still see this as some absolute TikTok narcissist-whisperer shit and emblematic of the worst of the reproducibility crisis and conclusion-chasing in the social sciences – sincere respect for the social sciences though I may have.
Edit: I will add that not Charles Ham, not Mark Lang, not Nicholas Seybert, and not Sean Wang are psychologists, psychiatrists, social workers, or frankly fucking anything; they’re in business studies.
I had the same reaction to that paragraph, but the very next paragraph is more compelling:
In another experiment, the authors primed CEOs’ narcissistic self-image by asking them to reflect on the role that a bold, assertive ego played in the successes of Apple CEO Steve Jobs and Oracle cofounder Larry Ellison. Afterward, leaders who’d been primed were more likely to oppose working from home, compared with those who weren’t primed. This, the researchers concluded, suggests a causal link between activating ego and opposing remote work.
Could I then use this handwriting phrenology to claim that Jimmy Carter was a bigger narcissist than Barack Obama was a slightly bigger narcissist than Adolf Hitler?
I understand they’re considering other factors, but this is so obviously fucking stupid.
Time to focus on the other factors, all these studies have loose edges. It comes from using subjective measurements. The results are in line with what we know about CEOs so it’s tempting to get onboard.
Dude, come the fuck on. I take psychology as a serious science, so this methodology legitimately offends me: signature size as a metric for narcissism? Get the actual fuck out of here. This reeks of a paper in search of a conclusion.
It sounds stupid to me too but I looked it up and it turns out there is a proven correlation between signature size and narcissism.
If you actually look at the evidence presented, they cite this 2019 meta-analysis in the Journal of Management: “Making CEO Narcissism Research Great [ew]: A Review and Meta-Analysis of CEO Narcissism”. On signature size, for which it found only two studies by nearly the exact same team, it remarked:
I still see this as some absolute TikTok narcissist-whisperer shit and emblematic of the worst of the reproducibility crisis and conclusion-chasing in the social sciences – sincere respect for the social sciences though I may have.
Edit: I will add that not Charles Ham, not Mark Lang, not Nicholas Seybert, and not Sean Wang are psychologists, psychiatrists, social workers, or frankly fucking anything; they’re in business studies.
thank you for this thoughtful comment. i was scrolling, hoping in vain for someone to bring up reproducibility, kr more specifically, HARCing
I had the same reaction to that paragraph, but the very next paragraph is more compelling:
I agree with your skepticism about the metric, but there’s a gigantic example to be found in the oval office…
Could I then use this handwriting phrenology to claim that Jimmy Carter was a bigger narcissist than Barack Obama was a slightly bigger narcissist than Adolf Hitler?
I understand they’re considering other factors, but this is so obviously fucking stupid.
Time to focus on the other factors, all these studies have loose edges. It comes from using subjective measurements. The results are in line with what we know about CEOs so it’s tempting to get onboard.