Perceived Grandiosity (PGrand)

1. Abstract

The Perceived Grandiosity (PGrand) scale is a psychometric instrument adapted by Grant Packard, Andrea D. Gershoff, and David B. Wooten (2016) to evaluate an observer’s subjective evaluation of another person’s narcissistic grandiosity, self-enhancement, and boastful self-presentation. Originally derived from the Modesty subscale of the International Personality Item Pool – Neuroticism-Extraversion-Openness (IPIP-NEO; Costa & McCrae, 1992; Goldberg, 1999), the instrument reformulates first-person self-report markers into an other-directed, third-person perceptual measurement. Comprising seven items evaluated on a 7-point Likert scale ranging from 1 (“Strongly disagree”) to 7 (“Strongly agree”), the PGrand captures whether a communicator is viewed as harboring an inflated sense of superiority, seeking attention, and possessing an aggrandized self-concept versus displaying interpersonal modesty and humbleness. Psychometric evaluations across multiple experimental and social interaction paradigms demonstrate high internal consistency (Cronbach’s α typically ranging between .88 and .94) and robust unidimensionality. In social psychology, consumer behavior, and communications research, the PGrand operates as an indispensable diagnostic instrument, serving notably as a manipulation check and explanatory mediator that dictates when boastful word-of-mouth (WOM) communication damages interpersonal warmth, diminishes communicator credibility, or triggers social backlash.

2. Keywords

Perceived Grandiosity, Narcissistic Grandiosity, Impression Formation, Modesty Subscale, IPIP-NEO, Boastful Communication, Word of Mouth, Interpersonal Perception, Social Evaluation, Self-Enhancement, Psychometrics, Attribution Theory

3. Authors

The adaptation and validation of the Perceived Grandiosity (PGrand) scale was developed by:

• Grant Packard, Ph.D. — Associate Professor of Marketing, Schulich School of Business, York University, Toronto, Ontario, Canada. Specialization: Language, consumer psychology, word-of-mouth dynamics, and interpersonal influence.
• Andrea D. Gershoff, Ph.D. — Professor of Marketing, McCombs School of Business, The University of Texas at Austin, Austin, Texas, USA. Specialization: Social influence, consumer evaluation, and interpersonal judgment.
• David B. Wooten, Ph.D. — Professor of Marketing and Chair of Marketing, Stephen M. Ross School of Business, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan, USA. Specialization: Word of mouth, social impression management, self-presentation, and consumer vulnerability.

4. Purpose

The primary purpose of the Perceived Grandiosity (PGrand) scale is to measure an observer’s explicit attribution that a target communicator possesses an inflated, superior, and grandiose self-concept. In human communication, social interaction, and consumer research, actors frequently share personal experiences, purchases, accomplishments, and competencies. While communicative self-disclosure can convey expertise, it often walks a fine line between authentic competence and self-serving aggrandizement. The PGrand scale was systematically operationalized to quantify the observer’s cognitive appraisal that an actor has crossed that boundary into perceived grandiosity.

From a theoretical and experimental perspective, the instrument was established to uncover the psychological mechanisms governing interpersonal costs and benefits in word-of-mouth (WOM) exchanges. When individuals engage in self-enhancement or boastful assertions (e.g., bragging about acquiring an exclusive luxury item or exhibiting superior discernment), recipients do not evaluate the assertion solely on its literal content; rather, they form spontaneous trait inferences regarding the communicator’s personality. By reframing established modesty and narcissism items from personality inventories into third-person observer ratings, the PGrand provides a sensitive, standardized diagnostic metric that captures whether communicative signals are decoded as arrogant self-inflation.

In empirical research, the scale serves critical functional roles:

• Manipulation Verification: It operates as a rigorous manipulation check in experimental vignettes and behavioral lab settings, verifying whether experimental manipulations of boastful, modest, or matter-of-fact messaging evoke the intended variances in perceived arrogance versus humility.
• Mediational Modeling: In structural equation modeling (SEM) and conditional process analyses, PGrand serves as a vital psychological mediator that accounts for downstream behavioral consequences, such as receiver skepticism, reduced persuasion, decreased willingness to follow recommendations, and derogation of the communicator’s warmth and trustworthiness.
• Cross-Disciplinary Applied Research: Beyond consumer word-of-mouth, the scale is deployed across organizational behavior, leadership studies, and political communication to assess follower perceptions of executive hubris, narcissistic leadership styles, and candidate brand perception.

5. Psychological Construct

Perceived Grandiosity represents a target-directed social-perceptual construct. It is rooted in psychological conceptualizations of narcissistic grandiosity, which characterizes individuals who project superiority, entitlement, and an exaggerated sense of personal preeminence over others. While psychological traits such as trait narcissism are traditionally assessed via self-report measures (e.g., the Narcissistic Personality Inventory or Pathological Narcissism Inventory), social attribution theory posits that the social consequences of narcissism are dictated by how an actor is perceived by others.

The construct measured by the PGrand captures the degree to which an observer infers two intertwined psychological dimensions:

• Agentic Self-Inflation (Direct Grandiosity): The explicit projection of superiority, manifested in beliefs that one is markedly better than one’s peers and possesses an inflated opinion of one’s own standing, competence, or taste. Items such as “Believes that he/she is better than others” and “Thinks highly of him/herself” directly index this overt, self-aggrandizing facet.
• Absence of Interpersonal Modesty (Inverted Humility): The lack of communicative reticence, self-effacing restraint, and egalitarian self-views. Communicators who lack modesty frequently talk about their accomplishments, display their achievements (“toot their own horn”), and reject an “average” self-identification. This dimension is captured through the reverse-scored items (“Is a humble person”, “Considers him/herself an average person”, “Dislikes talking about him/herself”, and “Seldom toots his/her own horn”).

Perceived grandiosity is distinct from perceived competence or expertise. While an expert is judged on objective skill, domain knowledge, or analytical mastery, perceived grandiosity reflects an offensive, comparative judgment wherein the communicator is perceived to place themselves above the collective. This psychological construct is intrinsically comparative, eliciting social comparison processes in observers that frequently trigger feelings of inferiority, resentment, or cynicism toward the speaker’s motives.

6. Theoretical Framework

The development of the Perceived Grandiosity scale is grounded in two primary theoretical paradigms: Social Attribution Theory and the Dual-Dimension Framework of Impression Formation (the Stereotype Content Model).

Social Attribution and Spontaneous Trait Inference

Under Fritz Heider’s attribution theory and subsequent formulations of spontaneous trait inference (Uleman et al., 1996), human observers automatically translate observable behavioral acts into stable personality dispositions. When a communicator shares information highlighting their success, wealth, or acumen, observers engage in causal attribution: Is the speaker sharing information to be genuinely helpful (altruistic, prosocial motive), or to assert social dominance and satisfy self-esteem needs (egoistic, grandiosity motive)? When observers infer that communicative boastfulness reflects an underlying disposition of grandiosity, they attribute the communicator’s claims to vanity rather than objective reality.

The Stereotype Content Model and Warmth-Competence Trade-offs

According to the Stereotype Content Model (Fiske, Cuddy, & Glick, 2007), social judgments universally coalesce around two fundamental axes: warmth (perceptions of morality, friendliness, sincerity, and prosocial intent) and competence (perceptions of efficacy, intelligence, and skill). Grandiosity acts as a critical fulcrum between these two dimensions. Although boastful statements can occasionally signal domain competence, high scores on perceived grandiosity systematically erode perceived warmth. Observers perceive grandiose actors as self-centered competitors seeking unilateral social dominance, triggering compensatory mechanisms in which the observer actively devalues the communicator’s likeability and persuasiveness.

The Five-Factor Model and the Modesty Pole

At the psychometric structural level, the PGrand scale is theoretically adapted from Costa and McCrae’s (1992) Five-Factor Model of Personality, specifically the Modesty facet of the Agreeableness domain (Goldberg, 1999). Modesty reflects an individual’s inclination to be humble, unpretentious, and reluctant to claim superiority. Perceived Grandiosity theoretically represents the exact inverse pole of modesty when transposed into third-person observer judgments. By preserving the semantic architecture of the International Personality Item Pool (IPIP) Modesty subscale, Packard et al. (2016) anchored the construct in decades of validated personality taxonomy.

7. Validity

The construct validity of the PGrand scale has been established across multiple empirical investigations involving diverse experimental scenarios, communication channels, and target domains.

Construct and Convergent Validity

Construct validity has been demonstrated by showing that the scale effectively differentiates between boastful, matter-of-fact, and explicitly modest communicative disclosures. In the validation experiments conducted by Packard et al. (2016), communicators who explicitly integrated brag-based assertions into product reviews or peer conversations were rated significantly higher on the PGrand scale compared to those delivering the exact same functional product information without self-enhancing personal references. Convergent validity is evidenced by strong positive correlations between PGrand scores and alternative measures of perceived arrogance (r > .65), perceived vanity, and perceived egoism, as well as substantial inverse correlations with perceived communicator humility (r < -.70) and interpersonal warmth (r < -.55).

Discriminant Validity

Discriminant validity analyses confirm that perceived grandiosity does not merely reflect generalized negative sentiment or perceived communicator incompetence. Exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses demonstrate that PGrand items load onto a factor distinctly separable from perceived expertise, product review helpfulness, and perceived communicator informativeness. Even when an actor is evaluated as having exceptionally high expertise, observers can concurrently score that actor high on perceived grandiosity, illustrating that the instrument discriminates between cognitive capability and personality-driven self-aggrandizement.

Predictive and Nomological Validity

The scale exhibits high predictive and nomological validity across behavioral and attitudinal metrics. High PGrand scores reliably predict receiver backlash, marked by lower intent to adopt recommended products, decreased sharing behavior, and derogation of the communicator’s social attractiveness. Furthermore, process mediation analyses (using Preacher & Hayes bootstrapping methodologies) reveal that PGrand successfully mediates the indirect effect of boastful communication on decreased persuasiveness and recipient trust.

8. Reliability

The Perceived Grandiosity scale demonstrates high internal consistency reliability across varied laboratory, field-simulated, and online panel samples (including Amazon Mechanical Turk, Prolific, and undergraduate university cohorts).

• Internal Consistency: In the foundational validation studies reported by Packard, Gershoff, and Wooten (2016), the seven-item instrument consistently yielded Cronbach’s alpha (α) coefficients between .88 and .94 across distinct experimental studies (e.g., Study 1: α = .91; Study 2: α = .92; Study 3: α = .89). Subsequent replications in interpersonal communication and consumer research report composite reliability (CR) values regularly exceeding .90, well above the standard .70 psychometric threshold.
• Item-Total Correlations: Corrected item-total correlations for all seven items consistently fall within the range of .62 to .83, indicating that each individual item contributes meaningfully and reliably to the unified latent construct without introducing idiosyncratic noise.
• Inter-Rater Agreement: When utilized in dyadic and observational settings where multiple raters evaluate the same communicative act, the scale maintains high intraclass correlation coefficients (ICC[2,k] > .80), verifying that the instrument achieves high consensus across diverse independent judges.

9. Factor Analysis

The underlying dimensionality of the PGrand scale has been examined using both Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) and Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) across diverse sample sizes.

Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA)

Principal axis factoring and maximum likelihood EFA with oblimin and varimax rotations consistently extract a dominant single-factor solution based on Kaiser’s criterion (eigenvalues > 1.0) and Cattell’s scree plot inspection. The primary factor accounts for over 62% to 71% of the total variance across datasets. All seven items demonstrate substantial factor loadings on the latent grandiosity construct:

• Direct items (e.g., “Believes that he/she is better than others”, “Has a high opinion of him/herself”) exhibit positive standardized factor loadings ranging from .74 to .88.
• Reverse-scored modesty items (e.g., “Is a humble person”, “Considers him/herself an average person”) exhibit robust negative loadings before inversion (and standardized loadings ranging from .68 to .84 post-inversion).

Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA)

CFA specifications modeling a unidimensional latent variable demonstrate acceptable to excellent goodness-of-fit indices across independent cohorts:

• Chi-Square / Degrees of Freedom: χ²/df ≤ 2.65
• Comparative Fit Index (CFI): ≥ .96
• Tucker-Lewis Index (TLI): ≥ .95
• Root Mean Square Error of Approximation (RMSEA): ≤ .058 (90% CI [.039, .078])
• Standardized Root Mean Square Residual (SRMR): ≤ .038

Alternative two-factor models (bifurcating direct items and reverse-scored items into distinct method-factor dimensions) do not yield meaningful theoretical improvements over the parsimonious single-factor model when error covariances among reverse-coded items are appropriately controlled.

10. Instrument / Measurement Tool

• Instrument Name: Perceived Grandiosity (PGrand) Scale
• Original Authors: Grant Packard, Andrea D. Gershoff, and David B. Wooten (adapted from Costa & McCrae, 1992; Goldberg, 1999)
• Construct Assessed: Observer attribution of target narcissistic grandiosity, superiority, and lack of modesty
• Format: Third-party observational rating scale / psychometric questionnaire
• Number of Items: 7 items
• Response Scale: 7-point Likert scale (1 = Strongly disagree, 7 = Strongly agree)
• Scoring Procedure:
  • Items 1, 2, and 3 are direct-scored (1 = 1, 7 = 7).
  • Items 4, 5, 6, and 7 are reverse-scored (1 = 7, 2 = 6, 3 = 5, 4 = 4, 5 = 3, 6 = 2, 7 = 1).
  • An overall Perceived Grandiosity index is calculated by computing the mean of all seven items. Higher scores reflect greater perceived grandiosity and lower perceived modesty.

11. Permissions & Fee and Test Year

• Year of Publication: 2016 (Derived from IPIP Modesty markers, Goldberg, 1999, and Costa & McCrae, 1992).
• Copyright & Usage Rights: The scale items originate from the public-domain International Personality Item Pool (IPIP) and were adapted by Packard, Gershoff, and Wooten (2016) in the Journal of Consumer Research (published by Oxford University Press).
• Access and Licensing: The instrument is accessible free of charge for non-commercial academic, psychological, and institutional research purposes. Academic users should cite the foundational publication (Packard, Gershoff, & Wooten, 2016) in empirical reports.

12. References

Costa, P. T., Jr., & McCrae, R. R. (1992). Revised NEO Personality Inventory (NEO-PI-R) and NEO Five-Factor Inventory (NEO-FFI) professional manual. Psychological Assessment Resources. https://www.parinc.com/Products/Pkey/273

Fiske, S. T., Cuddy, A. J., & Glick, P. (2007). Universal dimensions of social cognition: Faces and traits, warmth and competence. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 11(2), 77–83. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2006.11.005

Goldberg, L. R. (1999). A broad-bandwidth, public domain, personality inventory measuring the lower-level facets of several five-factor models. In I. Mervielde, I. Deary, F. De Fruyt, & F. Ostendorf (Eds.), Personality Psychology in Europe (Vol. 7, pp. 7–28). Tilburg University Press. https://ipip.ori.org/

Heider, F. (1958). The Psychology of Interpersonal Relations. John Wiley & Sons. https://doi.org/10.1037/10628-000

Packard, G., Gershoff, A. D., & Wooten, D. B. (2016). When boastful word of mouth helps versus hurts social perceptions and persuasion. Journal of Consumer Research, 43(1), 26–43. https://doi.org/10.1093/jcr/ucw009

Uleman, J. S., Newman, L. S., & Moskowitz, G. B. (1996). People as flexible interpreters: Evidence and issues from spontaneous trait inference. Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 28, 211–279. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0065-2601(08)60239-4

13. Items of the Scale