There are two kinds of narcissism

Not every narcissist brags about being the best. Some brag about being the kindest.

When we picture a narcissist, we usually imagine the braggart chasing status and admiration. But researchers increasingly recognize a second flavor: the “communal” narcissist, who inflates themselves not through competence but through goodness, “I’m the most caring, the most moral, the most selfless person in the room.” This study examined how these styles connect to self-enhancement in 306 Polish and Italian university students. Participants completed measures of four narcissism dimensions (admiration, rivalry, sanctity, and heroism) plus two ways people puff themselves up: “overclaiming” (confidently claiming to know things that don’t actually exist) and the “better-than-average” effect. The pattern was telling. Among the agentic, status-oriented traits, only admiration reliably drove self-enhancement. Among the communal traits, both sanctity and heroism did, communal narcissists really do self-enhance, just in the moral domain. There were cultural wrinkles too: in Italy, communal self-enhancement showed up mainly in the milder better-than-average effect. The sample is small and made up of students, so it’s a piece of a larger puzzle rather than the last word. But the message is worth sitting with: the loudest “look how good a person I am” can be its own form of self-obsession, and narcissism doesn’t always announce itself as arrogance, sometimes it wears the mask of virtue.