Hidden Narcissistic Traits May Make It Harder to Forgive, Study Finds

People with unconscious antagonistic narcissistic traits may struggle to forgive others at a deeply automatic level, tending to withdraw and avoid reconciliation rather than actively seek revenge. New clinical research links these hidden traits to reduced forgiveness, even when standard questionnaires fail to detect narcissism.

The study, titled Associations between Implicit Antagonistic Narcissism and Forgiveness: Insights from a Clinical Sample, was conducted by Philipp Wülfing, Carsten Spitzer, Emanuel Severus, and Ramzi Fatfouta and adds to a growing body of work on the hidden layers of personality.

Published in the Journal of Behavior Therapy and Experimental Psychiatry, the research focused on women receiving psychiatric treatment. It suggests that automatic, unconscious processes can undermine efforts to repair relationships, with potentially important implications for therapy and mental health outcomes.

Forgiveness and mental health

Forgiveness is widely recognized as an important factor in restoring relationships and supporting psychological well-being. It can emerge as a specific response to a single offense or as a broader personality tendency to let go of grudges more easily.

People who are generally more forgiving often report lower levels of anxiety, depression and stress. In contrast, chronic resentment and difficulty forgiving can prolong emotional distress and complicate recovery from mental health conditions.

Antagonistic narcissism explained

Psychologists increasingly view narcissism as a spectrum of traits rather than a single label. Some dimensions, such as seeking admiration or leadership roles, can be relatively benign or even adaptive in certain circumstances.

Other aspects, known as antagonistic narcissism, are more problematic and include hostility, entitlement and a tendency to dominate or devalue others. These antagonistic traits can contribute to angry reactions when people feel slighted or criticized.

In therapy, antagonistic narcissism can make it difficult to resolve conflicts, accept feedback or relinquish long-held grievances. Patients may appear cooperative on the surface while deeper automatic reactions continue to fuel emotional distance and distrust.

Limits of self-report surveys

Previous research examining narcissism and forgiveness has relied heavily on self-report questionnaires. These tools ask people to evaluate their own characteristics, such as how forgiving they are or how entitled they feel compared with others.

However, surveys have an important limitation when assessing socially undesirable characteristics such as hostility or socially valued behaviors such as forgiveness. Respondents may present themselves more favorably or simply lack insight into their own motives and behavioral patterns.

To address this problem, psychologists use dual-process models of the mind. These models distinguish between deliberate, conscious thinking and a faster, automatic system shaped by learned associations and emotional habits.

Under stress or during periods of mental health difficulty, automatic processes can dominate behavior, sometimes in ways a person cannot easily explain. This makes examining both conscious and unconscious traits important when studying complex interpersonal processes such as forgiveness.

How the clinical study was conducted

Philipp Wülfing of the University Medical Center Rostock and independent Berlin-based researcher Ramzi Fatfouta led the investigation. They analyzed data from 102 women receiving treatment at a psychosomatic clinic in Germany.

Participants had a range of mental health diagnoses, with major depressive disorder and anxiety disorders being the most common. The clinical setting allowed researchers to examine how unconscious traits operate among people actively receiving psychological care.

To measure explicit narcissism, participants completed standardized questionnaires assessing entitlement, rivalry and their general tendency to forgive. Additional questions asked how they would respond to specific interpersonal offenses in everyday situations.

These scenario-based measures assessed motivations to seek revenge, avoid the offender or respond with benevolence. Revenge involved wanting the other person to experience consequences, avoidance involved emotional or physical distance, and benevolence reflected continued goodwill despite being hurt.

Researchers then used the Implicit Association Test to assess automatic associations. This computer-based method infers unconscious tendencies by measuring how quickly participants categorize different groups of words.

In one task, participants rapidly sorted self-related words alongside terms associated with narcissistic or non-narcissistic concepts. Faster pairing of self-related words with antagonistic narcissistic terms indicated stronger implicit antagonistic traits.

A second task measured implicit forgiveness. It recorded response times as participants sorted self-related words together with concepts associated with being forgiving or vengeful. Faster associations with forgiving words indicated greater automatic forgiveness.

What the researchers discovered

Statistical analysis revealed a clear association between implicit antagonistic narcissism and reduced forgiveness. Women who scored higher on the unconscious narcissism measure tended to show lower levels of automatic forgiveness in the computer-based tasks.

The same participants also reported lower general forgiveness on traditional self-report scales, suggesting that their underlying tendency to forgive was consistently diminished. Their responses to hypothetical offenses further showed a stronger motivation to avoid people who had hurt them.

Importantly, they also showed reduced benevolence toward offenders, indicating less willingness to maintain goodwill or repair the relationship. The implicit narcissism measure helped explain these forgiveness patterns beyond what explicit questionnaires alone could capture.

By contrast, direct self-report measures of narcissism showed few robust associations with forgiveness. Only one conscious trait, rivalry, was linked to a stronger desire for revenge following an offense.

The implicit narcissism test did not predict revenge motives. The authors suggest that automatic antagonism may manifest more through emotional withdrawal or coldness than through active retaliation.

Revenge often requires deliberate planning and sustained attention, processes that are more closely connected with conscious decision-making. The faster, automatic responses captured by the computer tasks align more closely with immediate avoidance and reduced warmth.

Implications and next steps

The study included only 102 female patients from a single clinical setting, limiting how broadly its findings can be applied. Antagonistic traits and forgiveness may manifest differently among men or people outside clinical populations.

Because the research captured participants at a single point in time, it cannot determine whether unconscious narcissism leads to reduced forgiveness or whether both develop together because of other factors. Longitudinal studies would be needed to clarify this relationship.

The research also relied on questionnaires and computer-based tasks rather than observations of real-life conflicts between partners, friends or family members. Future studies examining everyday interactions could provide deeper insight into how implicit traits influence forgiveness in practice.

Despite these limitations, the findings highlight the potential importance of assessing hidden personality dynamics in psychiatric care. Patients may present themselves as fair-minded and forgiving in conversation while automatic reactions continue to contribute to avoidance and emotional distance.

For therapists, this suggests that effective treatment may need to extend beyond a patient’s stated self-image. Interventions targeting underlying emotional patterns and relationship schemas, including certain forms of cognitive-behavioral or psychodynamic therapy, might help patients change entrenched responses.

By bringing unconscious antagonism into awareness and addressing it directly, clinicians may help support a greater capacity for forgiveness, which in turn can improve both psychological well-being and the stability of close relationships.

Article prepared by Victoria Caldwell.