The rap against b-school students for some time now has been that they’re self-centered people focused on money who will stop at nothing, including cheating, to advance their own interests. Like most sweeping generalizations that one is probably wrong almost as often as it’s right.
Now comes some new research that suggests that the generalization has more than a dash of truth to it. The study, presented Tuesday at the annual meeting of the Academy of Management in Montreal, was authored by four researchers from Appalachian State University in North Carolina. Jim Westerman, Jacqueline Bergman, Shawn Bergman, and Joseph Daley surveyed more than 500 undergraduate business and psychology students at their school and concluded that they are more narcissistic than college students of the past, and that of the two, business students exhibit the highest levels of the personality trait .
Since the study hasn’t been published, I called Westerman for the low-down on the study’s findings. He told me that the students who were surveyed were measured for narcissism using something called the Narcissistic Personality Inventory. The NPI presents pairs of statements and asks subjects to choose the one that best describes them; it gives researchers a way to quantify personality traits such as modesty, selfishness, and assertiveness.
So how bad is it for b-school students? Pretty bad. The researchers, Westerman said, found that psychology students had an average NPI score of 15.19. The business students registered 17.67 on the narcissism scale. (Keep in mind that they still have a ways to go before they hit Donald Trump levels; the NPI tops out at 30.) And it gets worse. Westerman said the team compared the NPI scores it found with those reported by previous researchers. In 1992, the average NPI score of college students (not just business students) reported in one study was 15.93; a few years earlier, in 1987, it was 15.65. College students, particularly business students, were turning into full-blown ego maniacs.
Read the full article: Business School: Hotbed of Narcissism?