The Unified Narcissism Scale–Revised: Expanding Measurement and Understanding of Narcissism Across Cultures

Abstract

The study of narcissism has been hindered by conceptual, theoretical, and measurement in-consistencies. In this article, we report two studies that tested a novel unified conceptualization and theoretical approach to narcissism using the Unified Narcissism Scale–Revised. Study 1 revised the recently developed Unified Narcissism Scale to construct a preliminary 40-item measure in a sample of 395 American participants ( Mage = 41). We confirmed the five-factor first-order model, the two-factor second-order model, and the one-factor third-order model. Study 2 considered the cross-cultural performance of the revised scale in the Chinese language in China ( N = 326, Mage = 25.5 years) and in the English language in Sri Lanka ( N = 354 Mage = 28.7 years) and constructed a final 35-item measure. In conducting these studies, we have demonstrated the cross-cultural importance of entitlement and self-esteem to the conceptualization of narcissism and suggest that the negative relationship between narcissism and agreeableness may be culture-specific to Western samples (as evidenced by the absence of this relationship in non-Western samples). In this article, we have constructed a measure of narcissism that has refined our understanding of the construct and created a tool to capture this understanding.