Social relationships form the fundamental infrastructure of human well-being and psychological health. Strong connections can protect you from everyday stress and help you build mental resilience that lasts a lifetime. Conversely, social isolation is linked to many physical and mental health vulnerabilities. Although family interactions and romantic bonds have received much academic attention, platonic friendships are equally essential to a long and healthy life.
Friendships offer unique psychological benefits compared to other types of social connections. Relative relationships often involve strict biological or cultural obligations, and romantic partnerships are usually overlaid with intense emotional expectations. Platonic friendships are low-pressure environments where people can spontaneously disclose themselves. These relationships provide a safe space to practice social skills and find comfortable, nonjudgmental companionship.
Building a friendship is a completely voluntary process, so a key element in building that relationship is recognizing similarities. People are naturally attracted to strangers who share their personal values, core beliefs, and behavioral habits. Once a bond is established, friends naturally tend to evaluate each other as similar to themselves. However, special personality traits can act as a distorting lens and radically change the way people actively perceive similarities in individuals around them.
People who report high levels of narcissistic traits view common friendship habits differently than most people, and often perceive large gaps between their own behavior and that of their co-workers. Depending on the specific type of narcissism involved, these individuals may artificially enhance their own traits while degrading their friends, or they may idealize their peers at their own expense. A study describing these relationship dynamics was published in the journal Personality and Individual Differences.
Narcissism creates unique tensions in the normal rules of everyday social bonds. Typical narcissistic traits include a sense of grandiosity, a constant need for approval, and a strong belief that they are better than others. People who exhibit these characteristics truly believe that they are special compared to the average person. This deeply ingrained belief causes internal psychological conflict when building close and trusting friendships.
On the other hand, a narcissistic person may want to surround himself strictly with exceptional and high-status friends. They try to justify their superior social status by projecting their supposed greatness onto their peers. On the other side of the problem, these people constantly strive to maintain an isolated sense of personal uniqueness. Viewing friends as complete equals threatens their internal sense of social superiority and may ultimately lead to them devaluing their chosen friends.
Tobias Altmann of the University of Duisburg-Essen and Destanie Soles of Michigan Technological University wanted to test how these opposing internal motivations play out in everyday life. They needed a metric that was very relevant to human bonding. They decided to focus on how people use humor as a testing ground for questions in social situations.
Humor is a powerful relational tool that people rely on to strengthen bonds with strangers, ease tension in awkward situations, and establish a particular social identity. Psychologists typically classify human humor into four different approaches based on its intent and target. Two of these are considered adaptive styles, generally meant to promote mental well-being and social harmony. Two are considered maladaptive styles, meaning they are associated with neuroticism or interpersonal friction.
Affinity humor is an adaptive style that focuses on strengthening relationships through inclusive and positive jokes. Those who use the affiliative style may recount funny memories shared to make everyone at the party feel welcome. Self-enhancing humor is another adaptive style, characterized by maintaining humor and an optimistic outlook in the face of life’s inevitable challenges.
On the maladaptive side, aggressive humor is used to ridicule, belittle, or belittle other individuals in order to assert social superiority. People may engage in sarcastic teasing in order to degrade others and artificially increase their own social status. Self-defeating humor involves making oneself the subject of jokes to gain momentary approval, often by actively highlighting personal shortcomings.
Altman and Soles assessed how individuals rated their regular use of these four styles compared to the habits of their closest friends. Researchers also distinguished two completely different expressions of narcissism that guide outward behavior.
Grandiose narcissism manifests itself as overt entitlement, outward assertiveness, and a lack of empathy for others. People with high levels of grandiose narcissism actively project extreme self-confidence and try to convince the world of their special status. Vulnerable narcissists have exactly the same underlying sense of entitlement, but their outward appearances are quite different. This personality type is associated with deep anxiety, irritability, and a strong tendency to socially withdraw from unpleasant situations.
People with vulnerable narcissistic traits oscillate between intense feelings of grandiosity and devastating feelings of shame. To capture the real impact of both characteristics, the researchers organized two independent cross-sectional evaluations. The first form of data collection involved 129 participants residing in Germany. The second study was conducted to assess patterns in distinctly different cultural and age demographics and recruited 131 participants residing in the United States.
In both geographic locations, participants completed a detailed psychological questionnaire measuring self-reported levels of both grandiose and vulnerable narcissism. They were then asked to think of a specific same-sex best friend. Using a modified humor index, they rated their own comedy preferences and then the perceived humor habits of their selected friends.
By analyzing both sets of behavioral responses, researchers were able to look for hidden mathematical discrepancies. The researchers rated whether participants rated themselves higher or lower than their friends across four different comedy categories.
Most participants without prominent narcissistic traits reported that their friends utilized social humor in ways very similar to themselves. However, as self-reported levels of narcissism increased, this reported consistency completely collapsed. Higher narcissism scores were consistently associated with lower perceived similarity in friendships.
The exact nature of the interpersonal rupture depended entirely on the flavor of narcissism exhibited by the participants. Grandiose narcissism was closely related to an observable phenomenon that researchers described as self-enhancement. These people consistently put themselves on a pedestal of behavior while looking down on their peers.
Specifically, those who scored high on tests of grandiose narcissism rated themselves as using a more adaptive and positive humor style than their peers. At the exact same time, they reported that their friends were relying more on maladaptive, offensive, or self-defeating jokes. They reduced the positive qualities of their designated best friends while effectively increasing their own social status.
Participants who showed high levels of vulnerable narcissism showed the exact opposite psychological pattern. They routinely rated their friends much more favorably than they rated themselves. They assumed that their close peers utilized highly adaptive bonding strategies, while they believed their humor to be primarily self-defeating and maladaptive.
These different reporting patterns closely track the less-met psychological needs that underlie each type of narcissism. Grandiose narcissists minimize positive traits in others that might threaten their own superiority. We isolate our own egos by portraying our friends’ jokes as hostile or mean.
Vulnerable narcissists suffer from deep-seated personal insecurities that they may compensate for by overly idealizing those around them. They are in dire need of constant reassurance from the outside world. This mental confusion may lead us to artificially increase the value of our peers, even if we have to distort our own self-evaluation in the process.
Although these broad trends emerged in the dataset, a comparison of the two national samples showed some discrepancies in the exact mathematical results. In an older German sample, self-enhancement and friend-enhancement effects were demonstrated across different humor styles. The American sample showed similar directional trends, but required different calculations to reveal some of the behavioral nuances.
The researchers noted several demarcation points to the current analysis that shape how the data should be evaluated. All information was obtained from cross-sectional self-report questionnaires. Humor is an inherently subjective topic. This means that two different people can hear the exact same sarcastic comment and interpret it very differently based on their personal backgrounds.
Assessing another person’s general sense of humor requires blindly inferring that person’s internal thought processes. This is an abstract concept that even lifelong friends may struggle to accurately answer on a common test. Future research could investigate this question by having participants generate actual jokes or funny captions and have their immediate creative output rated by friends in real time.
The two sample populations also differed in ways that could alter the underlying friendship relationships. The American group consisted primarily of young college students living on campus. Young people often form social bonds based solely on geographic proximity, such as sitting next to each other in a crowded classroom.
In contrast, the German sample consisted of older adults with a wider range of educational backgrounds and life experiences. Older adults may have the freedom to choose friends based entirely on shared personality traits and mutual humor preferences rather than simple convenience.
The study authors also asked participants to rate their same-sex friends to maintain baseline consistency in the study. Because heterosexual friendships often navigate very different social expectations, our findings may not fully correspond to mixed-sex relationships. The specific questionnaire used to measure grandiose narcissism also had low internal consistency scores, a common problem in brief psychological surveys, but one that limits the overall statistical reliability of the metric.
Despite these limitations, the evaluation shows clear and interesting behavioral trends. Extreme personality traits change the way people experience basic friendships and sharing laughter. For those overcoming narcissistic tendencies, friendships act as psychological mirrors, polished to reflect one’s superiority or angled to amplify deep insecurities.
The study, “Friendship through the Narcissist Lens: The Role of Narcissism in Perceived Humor Similarities Between German and American Friends,” was authored by Tobias Altman and Destanie Soles.
Heading options
- How narcissism limits the sharing of humor among close friends
- The narcissist’s mirror: How extreme personalities view their friends
- Why grandiose narcissists think their jokes are better than yours
- Does your best friend actually share your sense of humor?
- Humor in friendship and the hidden psychology of narcissism
- How vulnerable narcissists use friendship to hide their insecurities
- Narcissistic traits change the way people view their best friends
- The humor gap: Tracing extreme personality traits in social groups.
- Why some people intentionally downplay the humor of close friends
- Idealization or devaluation: The contradictory role of friendship in narcissism.
- What your joke style reveals about your ego and friendships
- Psychologists test how narcissistic traits affect long-term platonic bonds
