Why It Pays to Be a Jerk
>Measuring narcissism was tricky, Hambrick said. Self-reporting was not exactly an option, so he chose a set of indirect measures: the prominence of each CEO’s picture in the company’s annual report; the size of the CEO’s paycheck compared with that of the next-highest-paid person in the company; the frequency with which the CEO’s name appeared in company press releases. Lastly, he looked at the CEO’s use of pronouns in press interviews, comparing the frequency of the first-person plural with that of the first-person singular. Then he rolled all the results into a single narcissism indicator.<p>It must be nice to be able to just make up and use a method for identifying "narcissists" without having to test whether the people you're identifying as narcissists are, in fact, narcissists. In my opinion, if this is how you do research you can hardly call what you do science.