A criminal psychologist has lifted the lid on one tell-tale sign you’re dealing with a narcissist.
You might have heard the term ‘narcissist’ thrown around when talking about a particularly bad person, like a friend’s ex-partner or relative, or perhaps you’ve thought you’ve come face-to-face with one yourself.
According to the Mayo Clinic, the disorder is a mental health condition in which people have ‘an unreasonably high sense of their own importance’, seeking admiration and attention while lacking understanding or harboring any caring feelings towards others.
As a result, many narcissists come up against problems in their life, including in their relationships, at work or school and, sometimes, with the law.
Dr Julia Shaw, a German-Canadian criminal psychologist, works with murderers and psychopaths on a regular basis, tales of which she speaks openly about on her BBC Sounds true crime podcast, Bad People.
Dr Julia Shaw has one top tip to identify a narcissist (LADbible Stories/YouTube)
In her career, the 38-year-old psychologist has also gone on to prove how law enforcement tactics can essentially inspire people into confessing or recalling crimes that they never committed.
Now, the pro has given us some worthwhile insight on how we might be able to identify a real narcissist out in the wild.
Speaking to LADbible Stories during an episode of Honesty Box, Dr Shaw said: “People love this term right now, don’t they? Narcissist,” before revealing how anyone can be a narcissist, from your parents to an ex partner to even your therapist.
“Narcissism is a personality disorder,” she explained, which she says can be spotted by asking ‘specific kinds of questions’.
However, psychology studies over time have whittled down the key questions from 20 to 15 before settling on just the one, ultimate question, which she says is called the ‘single item narcissism scale’.
“Which is literally just the question, ‘Are you a narcissist?'” she said.
Although that seems like a blatant question a narcissist might dodge, Dr Shaw said the question is actually surprisingly ‘useful’.
A narcissist might feel overly self-important and want the ‘best’ things in life (Getty Stock Image)
“How do you spot a narcissist? Ask them,” she explained. “A narcissist would probably answer to this question, ‘Yeah but like, I am better than most people. It’s a realistic appraisal of myself,’ because that’s what narcissism is.
“It’s that overconfidence, it’s that thinking you’re great and thinking you’re better than you actually are.”
However, Dr Shaw said the term has slipped into everyday contexts and urged us all to be ‘incredibly careful with that’ as it ‘devalues the terms like narcissist in contexts that matter, like in a criminal context’.
She added: “It’s not useful because you’re just angry at somebody in real life, in normal sort of everyday life. So I think we need to be incredibly careful not to use this therapeutic language in this really casual, overly confident, inaccurate way because it takes away from context where it really matters.”
Her insight comes as the true crime specialist, who also hosts TV series Murder in Mind on the True Crime Channel, said neither men nor women are inherently ‘evil’.
“I don’t like the term ‘evil’, but certainly in terms of crime, I mean almost all crime is perpetrated by men and also the victims are most likely to be men,” Dr Shaw explained.
“So I think there it’s pretty clear that there’s a gender issue going on in terms of crime and rule breaking and anger and especially violent crimes, but all kinds of crimes really.”
