The endorsement of spiteful and strategic punishment for a third-party transgressor among vulnerable & grandiose narcissists following self-esteem threat

Participants consisted of 493 individuals recruited through Amazon’s Mechanical Turk program. Thirty participants were excluded from analyses for failing the suspicion probe and seven were excluded for not responding to all MCNS items, leaving a final sample of 456

Measures include: Maladaptive Covert Narcissism Scale (MCNS; Cheek et al., 2013): a measure of vulnerable narcissism (e.g., “I dislike being with a group unless I know that I am appreciated by at least one of those present”). Participants were asked to rate how representative each statement is of themselves from 1 (strongly disagree) to 5 (strongly agree).
Narcissistic Personality Inventory (NPI; Raskin & Hall, 1979). The NPI is a measure of the grandiose dimension of narcissism.

Participants were randomly assigned to either complete a task in which they received negative feedback (via false feedback on Remote Associates Test items) or a neutral task (i.e., a control condition).

Following the vignette, participants read a series of possible punishments for James, including four spiteful punishments (e.g., “I wish someone would ‘put James in his place’ and make him look foolish in front of everyone”) and four strategic punishments (e.g., “James should be required to see a psychologist who specializes in office bullying; the goal would be to help James see how his behavior affects others.”). Participants were asked to rate their endorsement of each using a Likert-type scale ranging from 1 (strongly disagree) to 4 (strongly agree).

The main hypotheses were that people high in vulnerable narcissism would report greater endorsement for spiteful punishment (Hypothesis 1) and less endorsement of strategic punishment (Hypothesis 2) following a self-threat (vs. no threat). Self-threat was not expected to affect the endorsement of spiteful or strategic punishment among people low in narcissism.