A great number of successful and influential people throughout history have been labelled narcissists, including Alexander the Great, Napoleon Bonaparte, Kanye West… and US President Donald Trump. His toddler tantrums, refusing to accept that he could ever be wrong and twisting the truth to get what he wants are classic signs.

But don’t just take our word for it. Allen Frances, a professor and author who literally wrote the criteria for narcissistic personality disorder in 1978, tells The Overtake: “Trump is a world-class narcissist, not just for our times, but also for the ages. He is an evil, self-serving, con man doing great harm to the current world and making the future much worse for our children and grandchildren. But his bad behaviour should not be confused with mental illness. It is an insult to the mentally ill, who are mostly well-meaning and well-behaved, to be lumped with Trump who is neither.”

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But are you a narcissist too? Psychological tests such as the Narcissistic Personality Inventory (NPI) typically involve dozens of questions to measure narcissism, but here’s a much simpler one for you to try.

The test

To what extent do you agree with this statement: “I am a narcissist.” (Note: The word “narcissist” means egotistical, self-focused, and vain.) Rate yourself on a scale of 1 (not very true of me) to 7 (very true of me).

Yes, that’s all there is to it.

Got your answer?

Is it honest?

Sure…?

Results

This question is called the Single Item Narcissism Scale (SINS), and has been shown to correlate usefully with more complex questionnaires as a simple indicator. The theory is that narcissists are happy — perhaps proud — to admit it.

The Overtake asked* 2,009 people (selected and weighted to represent the UK population), here’s the overall spread of answers:

If you answered 1, you’re with the majority in not feeling the slightest bit narcissistic. 2 probably means you’re being cautious about giving yourself the all-clear. 3 or 4 perhaps concedes some low-level narcissism. But 5, 6 or 7 puts you in a small minority that admits the description of a narcissist clearly applies to them.

Here’s how our survey results slice down by gender, age, region and response time:

The male ego

Average answer by gender

The vanity of youth

Average answer by age group

What’s Welsh for ‘narcissist’?

Average answer by region

Altruism hesitates

Response time in seconds by answer

*2,306 UK residents were polled using Google Surveys between 18th and 29th October 2017, to get 2,009 demographically-weighted respondents for analysis.