Narcissistic Admiration, Narcissistic Rivalry, and Self‐Esteem Across Cultures: The Moderating Role of Individualism–Collectivism

ABSTRACT Narcissism has been widely studied as a multifaceted personality construct comprising both narcissistic admiration and narcissistic rivalry, yet little is known about how these distinct subdimensions relate to self‐esteem across cultural contexts. Drawing upon the person–environment fit framework, the present study examined the associations between narcissistic admiration, narcissistic rivalry, and self‐esteem among 51,070 participants from 57 countries or regions. Multilevel modeling revealed that narcissistic admiration was consistently and positively associated with self‐esteem, whereas narcissistic rivalry was negatively associated with self‐esteem. These associations remained robust after controlling for individual‐level covariates (age, gender, subjective social class, residential area) and country‐level indicators (GDP per capita, Gini index). Exploratory analyses, including contrast tests and relative weight analyses, confirmed that narcissistic admiration had a significantly stronger association with self‐esteem than narcissistic rivalry. Specifically, narcissistic admiration accounted for 92.4% of the explained variance in self‐esteem, whereas narcissistic rivalry accounted for only 7.6%. Importantly, we found a significant cross‐level interaction: the positive association between narcissistic admiration and self‐esteem was stronger in more individualistic societies, but no such moderation effect was observed for narcissistic rivalry. These findings highlight the cultural contingency of narcissism's psychological implications and underscore the value of distinguishing between narcissistic subdimensions in cross‐cultural personality research.