How narcissistic are you really?

No. The NPI-16 measures ordinary personality traits that vary across everyone. Narcissistic Personality Disorder is a clinical diagnosis for a pervasive pattern of grandiosity, hunger for admiration and lack of empathy that damages a person's ability to function, and only a full clinical assessment can make it. Around 6.2% of adults meet the criteria; far more have high traits with no impairment at all.

Psychologists have argued about this for fifteen years. Jean Twenge and colleagues published widely quoted work showing NPI scores among American students rising between the 1980s and 2000s. Other researchers re-ran the numbers and found the effect small, and the most recent analyses suggest whatever rise there was has levelled off. If narcissism is exploding, the questionnaires haven't noticed.

Yes, and it usually does on its own. Studies that follow people over years find scores falling gradually from the mid-twenties through middle and late life, and the things that seem to do it are the humbling ones: long relationships, children, setbacks at work. The traits aren't fixed, and early life leaves its mark too; the childhood trauma test looks at how adversity shapes adult personality.

That you sit well above the middle, roughly in the top fifth of adults, on a measure of grandiose narcissism. It says you agree with statements about being special, liking attention and expecting to be noticed more often than most people do. That isn't a disorder, and it doesn't say you're a bad partner; plenty of people who score there are successful and well liked. What it's worth doing with a high score is asking the people close to you whether it matches how you come across, because the questionnaire can't. Population data on narcissism and related personality norms is compiled on the mental health statistics page.

That you sit near the bottom of the population on grandiose narcissism, which the instrument reads as low self-regard rather than as virtue. Very low scorers tend to be modest and deferential, and sometimes short of the confidence that gets people to speak up or take a lead. Adaptive narcissistic traits, healthy self-esteem, comfort in company and ambition, correlate with career success and resilience, so a very low score isn't automatically the healthy end of the scale. Extreme and rigid traits cause the damage, at either end.

Slightly. Men score about 1 to 2 points higher than women on the NPI across most studies, and clinical NPD is diagnosed more often in men, with lifetime prevalence of 7.7% against 4.8% in Stinson et al. 2008. Part of the gap may be what the test measures: the NPI catches grandiose narcissism, the loud assertive kind more common in men, and misses the vulnerable, hypersensitive kind more often seen in women. The ADHD quiz covers a screening that sometimes overlaps in the clinic.

Confidence is a realistic view of what you're good at and doesn't need anyone else to be smaller. Narcissism adds grandiosity, an inflated sense of importance, entitlement, the belief you deserve special treatment, and at the extreme a willingness to use people. The NPI-16 can't fully separate the two at the middle of the scale, because its confidence items and its grandiosity items overlap, and it only sorts them cleanly at the top. That gap between what people think they can do and what they can actually do is what the intelligence self-perception quiz measures, through the Dunning-Kruger lens.

Because the word is everywhere now. Pop psychology has turned "narcissist" into a label for anyone difficult or selfish, and a lot of people asking have been told they are one by a partner, a friend or a parent. Here's the odd part: people with clinical NPD rarely ask, because not reflecting on how you affect others is part of the condition. Most people who search this question score in the normal range and are doing something healthy by asking at all.

Not on the strength of a number. The NPI-16 is a self-report personality measure, not a relationship test, and many people with above-average scores are warm and attentive partners. What tells you something is behaviour you can see: whether they respect a boundary, show real interest in your side, take criticism and own their mistakes. If the relationship feels one-sided or controlling, an hour with a therapist will tell you more than any quiz score.

A 16-item questionnaire built by Ames, Rose and Anderson in 2006 as a short version of Raskin and Terry's 40-item Narcissistic Personality Inventory from 1988. Every item offers two statements and asks which one is more like you. Tested against the full 40-item version in students and community adults, the short form tracked it closely (r = 0.90) and moved with self-esteem, extraversion and agreeableness in the expected directions. It isn't a diagnostic instrument, but it's the brief measure academic researchers reach for most often.

Slowly. The traits are moderately heritable and fairly stable through adulthood, but they do move, mostly downwards over the years and mostly through experiences that force perspective-taking, accountability and long close relationships. In clinical groups, schema therapy and mentalization-based treatment have produced modest reductions. For ordinary trait narcissism the honest answer is that change comes over years rather than weeks and is driven more by life than by resolve. A score today is a snapshot.