Don't Tell Me What to Do! Narcissism and Advice Taking: A Meta-Analysis and Future Research Directions

In this meta-analysis, we investigated whether people with narcissistic traits are less likely than others to take advice. Additionally, we checked whether this would be independent of the advice giver's expertise and explored other potential moderators. Previously published and unpublished research has produced contradictory results, which motivated this pre-registered meta-analysis (k = 11, total number of participants = 2697) on the relation between narcissism and advice taking. We found a stable and robust, small, negative relation. Neither expertise of the advice giver nor other moderators were significant. We included robustness checks regarding participants, report characteristics, as well as operationalization of narcissism and advice taking. Theoretical, methodological and practical implications (for example, possible consequences of having people with narcissistic traits in positions of responsibility) are discussed and future research directions are outlined.