Jonkmann, K., Becker, M., Marsh, H. W., Lüdtke, O., & Trautwein, U. (2012). Personality traits moderate the Big-Fish–Little-Pond Effect of academic self-concept. Learning And Individual Differences, 22736-746. doi:10.1016/j.lindif.2012.07.020
Background: “In short, academic self-concepts are the result of social, dimensional, temporal, and criterion oriented comparisons: people build their beliefs about their capabilities in a certain subject domain by comparing their current performance with the performance of others, with their past performance, with their performance in other subject domains and with criterion standards.”
“/…/ Equally able students have lower academic self-concepts when attending high-achieving classrooms than when attending low-achieving classrooms. This effect is widely known in educational psychology as the Big-Fish-Little-Bond-Effect (BFLPE).”
Q: Does certain level of narcissism protect students’ self-concept in high-achieving environments?
Previous research on BFLBE moderators:
- cultural factors – fairly robust
- classroom environment – small or insignificant
- individual student characteristics – effect is stronger for students who use less elaborative (perfectionist) learning strategies (memorization), prefer cooperative learning, who are math anxious (stressed)
Result: Students high in narcissism experienced smaller BFLPEs than did those with lower levels of narcissism.