Narcissistic Personality Quiz

OK, this is just for fun on a Friday afternoon.  I found a quiz online which is supposed to determine whether you are a narcissist.

You can find it here: http://psychcentral.com/quizzes/narcissistic.htm 

Actually I found it a few days ago, but I keep re-taking it because keep getting scores that I can't believe.  Wait ... it's not what you think.

There are 40 questions.  I'm not sure, but I guess that each question scores either a 0 or a 1, depending on whether you choose the narcissistic answer or not.  Maybe it is more sophisticated than that.  In any event, what they say about the scoring is as follows:

Between 12 and 15 is average.
Celebrities often score closer to 18.
Narcissists score over 20.

Simple enough?  Sure.  I thought so too.  So when I first discovered the quiz I took a few minutes, whisked through the questions, and clicked the button to calculate a score.

I scored 4.

Wait, surely that's not possible.  Well I didn't worry about it then because I had other things to do that day (like work) but I came back a couple of days later and tried again.

This time I scored 3.

So just now I tried one more time, doing my level best to answer the questions as narcissistically as I could manage.  I thought of some of the screamingly narcissistic things I have written here, for example.  (This one still embarrasses me deeply.)  I tried to give myself whatever edge I thought I realistically could, given the way the questions were worded.

And this time I climbed all the way up to 7.  That's a full half of a "Normal" rating.

How is this possible?  Knowing how easily my ego can come untethered from reality, how can my score be so low?

I think it all has to do with the way the questions are worded, because many times I found myself conflicted about how to answer: my otherwise boundless egotism ran smack dab into my shyness and social fear.  So I made a point of agreeing with statements like "I am special" or "I am extraordinary."  I even tried to agree with the statements about being a natural leader, on the strength of the repeated experience that I cannot fade into the background ... that at every new job, people who are introduced to me for the first time say, "Oh, so you're Hosea! I've heard so much about you!"  But then there were all these questions about whether I like to show off my body, or whether I can make anybody believe anything I want them to believe, or whether I actually enjoy being praised in front of a crowd of others.  And the answers to all those are consistently No, No, and No.  I can't avoid public attention, but it embarrasses me.  I can't stop myself from from "laying down the law with elegant insolence" [as Dorothy Sayers once wrote about Peter Wimsey] in areas that I know something about, but I almost refuse to have an opinion about anything else for fear of looking like a loud-mouthed ignorant boor.  And showing off my body?  Well I gave myself points for liking to look at myself in a mirror -- anything to boost my score up towards average -- but I don't pretend that other people notice me one way or another, or want to.  As far as I can tell, I'm kind of average-looking.  Maybe a little taller than average, but not by much.

So don't mistake my low score for indicating any kind of special virtue.  It's just that one set of vices are held in check by another.  Of course, I guess that's not all bad.  At least something holds them in check.

Anyway, it was fun.