Narcissism

 NY Times -  If you’re hoping that the narcissist in your life will change, a new study suggests that you may have to wait a very long time. And even then, you might see only a small difference. The research, which was published in the journal Psychological Bulletin on Thursday, analyzed 51 studies with more than 37,000 participants — mostly from North America, Europe and New Zealand — to explore how narcissism changes over a person’s life span. Although the researchers found that, on average, narcissism gradually declined as people aged, “the results show that this decline is not as large as one might hope,” said Ulrich Orth, the lead author of the paper and a professor of developmental psychology at the University of Bern in Switzerland. The declines in narcissism took place over the span of decades. “When you look back at how a close friend behaved 20 or 30 years earlier, you might notice the change,” Dr. Orth said. “Still, the average decline was at most of moderate size, so you wouldn’t expect that people’s level of narcissism changes fundamentally.”