But I thought narcissism was a prerequisite to be a CEO?
this post was submitted on 26 Jun 2026
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The want to see their monkeys in one cage.
I mean really why pay rents for the new open office concept if it doesn't feed their ego???
If I can save money hiring women a .76% and no rent I'm in!
Guess which (only) trait all the captured Nazis in Nuremberg shared?
Yeah, our society is not a good place to be in.
unobtrusive measures of narcissism via photo size, signature size, and relative compensation predicted greater resistance to remote work in public statements early in the COVID-19 pandemic.
Dude, come the fuck on. I take psychology as a serious science, so this methodology legitimately offends me: signature size as a metric for narcissism? Get the actual fuck out of here. This reeks of a paper in search of a conclusion.
It sounds stupid to me too but I looked it up and it turns out there is a proven correlation between signature size and narcissism.
If you actually look at the evidence presented, they cite this 2019 meta-analysis in the Journal of Management: "Making CEO Narcissism Research Great [ew]: A Review and Meta-Analysis of CEO Narcissism". On signature size, for which it found only two studies by nearly the exact same team, it remarked:
Ham[, Seybert, and Wang] (2018) and Ham, Lang, Seybert, and Wang (2017) employed an alternative unobtrusive measure of CEO narcissism by measuring the size and contents of a CEO’s signature in SEC filings (2 of 42 articles). Their rationale posits that a larger signature represents the grandiose nature of a narcissist. To validate the measure, Ham et al. used student samples in a laboratory setting. While the main advantage of the measure is that it captures a behavior under the direct control of the CEO (i.e., his or her signature), the measure may not fully capture narcissism’s multifaceted nature. Ham et al. also provided external validation by correlating the measure with employee ratings of CEO narcissism, as obtained by O’Reilly et al. (2014). As this is a newer measure, it has seen limited use to date.
I still see this as some absolute TikTok narcissist-whisperer shit and emblematic of the worst of the reproducibility crisis and conclusion-chasing in the social sciences – sincere respect for the social sciences though I may have.
Edit: I will add that not Charles Ham, not Mark Lang, not Nicholas Seybert, and not Sean Wang are psychologists, psychiatrists, social workers, or frankly fucking anything; they're in business studies.
I had the same reaction to that paragraph, but the very next paragraph is more compelling:
In another experiment, the authors primed CEOs’ narcissistic self-image by asking them to reflect on the role that a bold, assertive ego played in the successes of Apple CEO Steve Jobs and Oracle cofounder Larry Ellison. Afterward, leaders who’d been primed were more likely to oppose working from home, compared with those who weren’t primed. This, the researchers concluded, suggests a causal link between activating ego and opposing remote work.
I agree with your skepticism about the metric, but there's a gigantic example to be found in the oval office....
Could I then use this handwriting phrenology to claim that Jimmy Carter was a bigger narcissist than Barack Obama was a slightly bigger narcissist than Adolf Hitler?
I understand they're considering other factors, but this is so obviously fucking stupid.
I feel they could rewrite the article title to be Fortune 500 companies share narcissistic traits and it would still be true.
I'm a firm believer in that you can't get to a high level of anything without having some form of narcissistic or selfish traits.
I would love for Mike Judge to make Home Office Space about how Initec.AI (rebrand) is forcing workers back into the office
It would be a good short, for sure. Not enough there for a full length movie, IMHO.
I'm sure there will soon be some sort of zoomer sees "office space" for the first time YouTube videos. They'll then realize GenX "gets it" or something.
...and gen-x will not be affected by zoomie acceptance...
Those videos exist and it fuels my pitch black heart seeing them
I'm not surprised, but now I have to look for it. We've remained unseen by Society for the last 40 years. It's kind of surreal to see the stuff with GenX references right now.
Millennials are at that stage for sure, with enshittification, AI, and the xxteenth generational crisis in a row.
With the new King of the Hill and even the Beavis and Butthead revival a bit ago, wouldn't be a bad time for it IMO
Capitalists: people who need a peer reviewed study to realize they're assholes.
They want people fawning in person, remote fawning is not so moist xxx
To absolutely nobody's surprise.