Take our Narcissism Test

Find a therapist who understands narcissism.

Healthy self-esteem and narcissism have distinct features and consequences and do not lie on a continuum.

People are inherently biased towards overestimating their own performance, intelligence, and skills.

Narcissism is cultivated in children by overpraising them, focusing on social status and being outstanding.

Overconfidence, certainty, and the absence of doubt are the enemies of critical thinking.

Are we encouraging healthy self-esteem, or breeding a culture of narcissism, overconfidence, and inauthenticity when we “like,” act impressed by, or otherwise contribute to people’s inflated perceptions of their skills, knowledge, and attributes?

Overconfidence and certainty, by definition, are the enemies of critical thinking, which is the basis of intelligent judgment, problem-solving, and decision-making. Critical thinking involves curiosity, healthy doubt, and the deliberate consideration of how one’s conclusion might be wrong.

Inherent Bias Towards Overestimating One’s Own Abilities

Even without encouragement, people are inherently biased towards inaccurate, overly positive appraisals of themselves, believing they are better than their peers in terms of personality, qualities, and abilities (Zell et al., 2020). Predictably, less skillful people who perform poorly are even more likely to confidently miscalibrate their performance, overestimating how well they will do and, afterward, how well they did (Coutinho et al., 2024; Karaca et al., 2023).

Grandiose narcissists already believe they are superior to others and maintain their idealized self-image through seeking status, admiration, and dominance and doing so effectively (Kaufman et al., 2020). Blunted neural sensitivity in the error detection part of their brains further facilitates the ability to ignore contradictory evidence. (Robins et al., 2025).

Rise in Swagger Culture

A recent column in the New York Times (Sobrevilla, 2026) identified a cultural rise in swagger and a decrease in buzz about imposter syndrome.

In a social climate that rewards inflated confidence over accountability, accuracy, and appropriate humility, now, instead of imposter syndrome being in vogue, it’s normative and even popular to be an actual imposter (knowingly or not).

With imposter syndrome, people ignore evidence of their achievements and fear being exposed as a “fraud.” This phenomenon (not a medical syndrome) is associated with anxiety, perfectionism, self-doubt, and underestimating one’s competencies (Bravata et al., 2020). Not surprisingly, imposter syndrome is more prevalent among highly accomplished women adapting to the norms of environments such as academia (Feenstra et al., 2020).

Imposter syndrome proliferates in social discourse in certain contexts because it’s an easy, even desirable, condition to claim publicly since it........

© Psychology Today