Shake it off! Adaptive coping with stress strategies reduce national narcissism

Is national narcissism in any way related to the way we deal with stress? May adaptive coping with stress strategies weaken the tendency to narcissistically identify with one's nation? And what does conspiracy thinking have to do with it?

Results of our research suggest that adaptive coping with strategies, in which we directly face the stressor (e.g., planning, positive reinforcement and active coping), reduce national narcissism.

Importantly, we conducted an exepriment, during which we induced a specific stress-coping strategy in the participants (adaptive - active, maladaptive - denial or no strategy) and checked how it influenced national narcissism. The results we obtained demonstrate that inducing an adaptive way of coping with stress reduced national narcissism significantly.  Moreover, in this study, we also showed that an adaptive stress-coping strategy may also reduce conspiracy thinking and that this association is mediated by national narcissism.

Therefore, we argue that strengthening adaptive ways of coping with stress may potentially play an important role in shaping a less defensive national identity and a less conspiratorial way of thinking about the world. Our results also point towards the necessity to reduce national narcissism and to construct a safe way of identifying with one's nation, one which is free from prejudice and which shapes truly positive attitudes regarding members of our national group.

You can read more about the results of our recent research in an article published in The British Journal of Social Psychology, co-authored by Zuzanna Molenda, Marta Marchlewska, Marta Rogoza and Dagmara Szczepańska: Shake it off! Adaptive coping with stress reduces national narcissism

Research funded by the Polish Ministry of Education and Science as part of the „Science for Society” programme (project number NdS/529303/2021/2022 , total funding amount 1 714 305,00, total worth of the project 1 714 305,00) as well as by the Polish National Sciences Centre as part of the OPUS grant (2019/35/HS6/00123).