
Narcissistic Students Get Better Grades from Narcissistic Professors - jimsojim
https://hbr.org/2016/03/narcissistic-students-get-better-grades-from-narcissistic-professors?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=harvardbiz
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danharaj
> the idea that narcissism has increased among college students over the last
> 25 years is worrisome from an organizational perspective. Millennials are
> the next generation of leaders.

When i was in school, everyone was raving at me, barking madly that all of us
students had to be the leaders of tomorrow. Maybe it's because everyone is
obsessed with who gets to be a leader that people presume that they should be
leaders. Millenials are also the next generation of followers, or workers, or
you know, discarding hierarchical considerations: millenials are the next
generation of humans. Which is tautological.

Looking at the current field of candidates for leader of the most powerful (by
a few metrics, but not all) government of the world, i think the bar has been
set very low for millenials and the people who write articles like this merely
have some heavily tinted rose-colored glasses on about their "generation of
leaders".

That said, i don't think it's surprising that people in positions of power in
a hierarchical structure, like a university setting, are biased towards people
like them and hence create a selection effect within that power structure.
Isn't that the basic observation that validates affirmative action? Nepotism,
cronyism are commonly understood terms, but clearly they are specific cases of
a general phenomenon. You cannot separate the exercise of power from its
social implications. People being social creatures, they will exercise their
power in ways that have social consequences. That's why people are put in
positions of power in the first place.

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asQuirreL
This is an interesting point, and one I've seen from the other side as well:
When leaving secondary (high) school, for university, a common piece of advice
is: "You may have been one of the smartest people here, but be careful, you
probably won't be where you're going, so you have to manage your
expectations." But if everyone is being told this, then those who could become
some of the "smartest people at university", are being told it too, and some
of these people could be unnecessarily lowering their expectations. I've
always thought this was a great shame.

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danharaj
Preoccupation with status hardly helps cultivate the virtue that status was
supposed to indicate.

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stcredzero
Seems to me that "narcissism fit" definitely applies to a lot of schools and
companies. (Though to be fair, it's particular subgroups inside those
organizations that this really applies to.)

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kough
_coughivyleaguecough_

Yeah, definitely to subsets, but certainly not to a majority is my guess.
There are always people who meet the stereotype of a school, and always those
who don't. For every rich son-of-an-alum at Princeton there's someone on heavy
financial aid, more or less.

~~~
stcredzero
_coughivyleaguecough_

I'm one. This is part of how I know.

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noobermin
>And yet despite narcissists’ flaws, there’s lots of evidence that people are
drawn to them, not least because they tend to be very charismatic.

Is it possible to be both charismatic and not-narcissistic at all? I can't
think of a single example, to be honest, of a leader displaying charisma and
not being somewhat narcissistic.

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kordless
For someone to be charismatic, they may either inspire devotion by "followers"
or claim they are receiving divine inspiration. If someone finds themselves
with a bunch of people who are devoted to them, this is a form of implicit
trust. i.e. the thing that inspired originally may have been trustworthy, but
eventually the trust becomes implicit in that the "followers" will follow more
regardless of inspiration. I've written about this effect on cloud services
before.

Divine inspiration also deals with trust channels. If someone claims to be
divinely inspired (which I personally believe is possible - see Buddhism
Insight for example) then whoever they relate this information to will then
have to implicitly trust the information coming to them is actually
represented as the divine intended it (assuming they don't have direct access
themselves). Obviously, that's caused a lot of problems in the past for us, so
it's non-tenable. Teachers of the way[1] avoid dictating teachings received
from insight because of this. It's also probably why sutras tend to be very
terse, now I think about it.

The answer to your question is that it might be possible, but it's unlikely to
be possible for long as the trust channels turn implicit, which then has an
impact on the individual's relationship with their followers. When someone
trusts you implicitly, there is no feedback on whether their trust is
warranted or not, or put another way, there's no way for you to to trust if
the trust you are receiving is real. And _that_ is just as bad as you not
being trustworthy.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middle_Way](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middle_Way)

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analog31
Maybe "narcissism" will be over and done with, by the time we come up with a
popular stereotype for the next generation.

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tosseraccount
There is nothing new under the sun.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Me_generation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Me_generation)
_The baby boomers ... were dubbed the "Me" generation by writer Tom Wolfe
during the 1970s; Christopher Lasch was another writer who commented on the
rise of a culture of narcissism among the younger generation._

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noobermin
Is it ironic that it is often the "Me generation" that derides millennials as
being self-absorbed? Not that gen Xers don't as well.

~~~
tosseraccount
_" [young]... lives are regulated more by moral feeling than by reasoning --
all their mistakes are in the direction of doing things excessively and
vehemently. They overdo everything -- they love too much, hate too much, and
the same with everything else."_ \- Aristotle

Griping about those wacky young folks goes way back.

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xplot
A true fairytale ending.

