Automatic Imitation Is reduced In Narcissists but only in Egocentric Perspective-Takers

Scientific evidence indicating that humans are tuned to rapidly notice and respond to others’ behaviors mainly stem from the laboratory observations that we spontaneously imitate others’ movements even when such imitation interferes with a task at hand. For instance, seeing another person’s index finger being lifted slows us down when tasked to lift a non-index finger. One study showed however that highly narcissistic individuals are less interfered by their tendency to imitate others, but then this was not observed in two other studies. The current study shows that highly narcissistic individuals are indeed less interfered by their spontaneous imitations but only within a fraction of the population that is characterized as highly self-centered when tasked to adopt someone else’s point of view.