Narcissism, self-esteem, and conduct problems: evidence from a British community sample of 7-11 year olds.

The aim of the current report was to investigate the relationship between narcissism, self-esteem and conduct problems in a British community sample of pre-adolescent and young adolescent children (n = 659; 7-11 year olds). We demonstrated that narcissism is associated with conduct problems, but no evidence for an interaction between low self-esteem and high narcissism in the prediction of conduct problems was found. Whilst low self-esteem was associated with teacher-reported (but not parent-reported) conduct problems at the bivariate level of analyses, multi-variate analyses showed that self-esteem yielded no significant effects, neither independently, nor in interaction with narcissism for either parent- or teacher reported conduct problems. However, self-esteem was predictive of self-reported conduct problems at both the bivariate and multivariate level of analysis, possibly due to shared method variance. The findings suggest an important role for narcissism for conduct problems in children as young as seven years old.