Narcissistic admiration and rivalry in the context of personality metatraits

• Admiration groups with extraversion and intellect
• Rivalry groups with agreeableness, conscientiousness and emotional stability
• Narcissist is not disagreeable extravert but rather Unstable Plastic.

Narcissism is a puzzling construct containing many apparent paradoxes. The Narcissistic Admiration and Rivalry Concept represents an attempt to deconstruct some of these paradoxes. In this paper, we relate admiration and rivalry to the personality metatraits, i.e., Plasticity and Stability, in an attempt to demonstrate that the metatrait concept offers an interesting way of framing why admiration seems to be profitable for individuals, whilst rivalry appears to have a net cost. Based on previous studies, we examined how admiration and rivalry were related to self-esteem, impulsivity and personality traits in two prospective studies involving a total of 719 adults. Our results are consistent with those of Back et al. (2013). Additionally, we demonstrated that admiration is composed of extraversion and openness to experience, thus representing the Plasticity (Beta) metatrait, and rivalry is composed of agreeableness, emotional stability and conscientiousness and thus corresponds to the Stability (Alpha) metatrait. In the terminology of the circumplex model of personality metatraits, rivalry can be conceived as the opposite of Stability: Alpha-minus. We suggest that rather than being disagreeable extraverts, narcissists are Unstable Plastics.