Seen someone posting unusually “deep” career wisdom on your LinkedIn feed lately?
According to new research, that kind of profound-sounding update could be a clue they have narcissistic traits.
A study has shed light on how narcissistic people may present themselves on LinkedIn, the professional networking platform known for career advice, workplace reflections and polished personal branding.
Researchers at the University of Alabama conducted two experiments involving more than 650 participants.
Their findings showed that participants who scored higher for narcissism were more likely to want to appear thoughtful, intelligent and insightful on LinkedIn.
The reason, the researchers said, was not that they were easily fooled by lofty language, but that they were motivated to seem smart.
“Our findings suggest that endorsing empty, profound–sounding statements is not always a failure of judgment, it can be a tactical bid to look clever,” said the study’s lead author, William Hart.
“For narcissistic people in particular, appearing intellectually sophisticated seems to matter more than whether the statement actually means anything.”
Have you noticed someone sharing ‘deep’ takes on your LinkedIn feed? If so, they might be a narcissist (stock image)
From regularly looking in the mirror to constantly craving attention, there are several key signs that someone might be a narcissist.
However, until now, the link between LinkedIn habits and narcissism has remained a mystery.
To get to the bottom of it, the researchers conducted two experiments with 661 university students.
In the first experiment, participants were told to come across as either a ‘sophisticated’ or an ‘unsophisticated’ thinker.
They were then asked to rate a series of nonsense phrases that you’d find on LinkedIn.
The results revealed that those trying to seem sophisticated rated nonsense phrases as more profound – and were also more likely to claim they knew made-up facts.
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In the second experiment, participants completed surveys to assess how narcissistic they were, before being asked to rate the same nonsense phrases.
Again, the researchers found that the more narcissistic a participant was, the more likely they were to rate nonsense phrases as profound.
Interestingly, the effect had nothing to do with their actual thinking ability.
According to the researchers, this suggests that narcissists are not fooled by the nonsense so much as happy to endorse it if it makes them look clever.
The study comes shortly after the team at Kagi Translate developed a corporate gibberish translator.
The translator uses AI to reveal what words and phrases you see across LinkedIn really mean.
To test the tool, the Daily Mail fed it 10 elaborate posts, which you may see on LinkedIn.
According to the bot, a post claiming that someone is ‘grateful to be surrounded by builders, not spectators’, translates to: ‘I’m desperately trying to sound important by hanging out with people who actually do things.’
Meanwhile, if someone claims you should ‘invest in relationships, not transactions’, this really means: ‘Stop calling people you don’t actually like just because you might need a favor later.’
And if you hear someone slating the idea of a ‘work-life balance’, it probably means they have no life, according to the bot.
Vladimir Prelovac, Kagi’s founder and CEO, says he was inspired to create the tool after noticing a surge in jargon on LinkedIn.
‘LinkedIn has developed its own dialect at this point, complete with grammar, idioms and emotional conventions that would be unrecognisable to someone from even 15 years ago,’ he told The Times.
‘The humblebrags, the emoji cadence, the inspirational sign-offs… it also translates in reverse, decoding a wall of buzzwords back into plain English. That might actually be the more useful direction.
‘The world is a stressful place right now and I guess we all need a laugh.’
To try it yourself here, enter any corporate jargon into the ‘LinkedIn Speak’ section, and its true meaning will be revealed on the ‘English’ side.
