"Narcissistic leaders: even children fall for their superficial charms" by Eddie Brummelman.

 Recently I read an interesting article entitled "Narcissistic leaders: even children fall for their superficial charms" by Eddie Brummelman. The text tells about the problem of narcissism among children and leaders.

I had some knowledge of Narcissism before, because I am interested in psychology and mental disorders. However, thanks to this article, I learned a lot of new things. Interestingly, narcissism develops already in early childhood. From the age of seven, there are stable differences between children in their levels of narcissism. As adult narcissists, they often appear as leaders in groups. The psychologists decided to check whether the same is happening among children. They conducted an experiment. The researchers recruited a group of 332 children aged 7 to 14. They assessed their level of narcissism and then asked the children to write down the names of their classmates whom they saw as "the true leader". It turned out that as many as 98% of the selected children were narcissists.

Psychologists have asked themselves, "Do narcissistic children really have leadership abilities?" They conducted another experiment. They told the children to choose the best candidate for a police officer. Later, they would seat the selected child at the head of the table, giving him the opportunity to lead the discussion and make final decisions about the problem. It turned out that the narcissistic children turned out to be very average and did not perform better on the task than the other children.

The article shows that people often confuse confidence with competence. This helps to understand why narcissists are so often elected leaders.