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Narcissistic individuals are prone to become aggressive when their egos are threatened. We report a randomized field experiment that tested whether a socialpsychological intervention designed to lessen the impact of ego threat reduces narcissistic aggression. A sample of 405 young adolescents (mean age — 13.9 years) were randomly assigned to complete either a short self-affirmation writing assignment (which allowed them to reflect on their personally important values) or a control writing assignment. We expected that the self-affirmation would temporarily attenuate the ego-protective motivations that normally drive narcissists 9 aggression. As expected, the self-affirmation writing assignment reduced narcissistic aggression for a period of a school week, that is, for a period up to 400 times the duration of the intervention itself. These results provide the first empirical demonstration that buttressing self-esteem (as opposed to boosting self-esteem) can be effective at reducing aggression in at-risk youth.

A meta-analytic review was conducted to explain divergent findings on the relation between children's aggressive behavior and hostile attribution of intent to peers. Forty-one studies with 6,017 participants were included in the analysis. Ten studies concerned representative samples from the general population, 24 studies compared nonaggressive to extremely aggressive nonreferred samples, and 7 studies compared nonreferred samples with children referred for aggressive behavior problems. A robust significant association between hostile attribution of intent and aggressive behavior was found. Effect sizes differed considerably between studies. Larger effects were associated with more severe aggressive behavior, rejection by peers as one of the selection criteria, inclusion of 8- to-12-year-old participants, and absence of control for intelligence. Video and picture presentation of stimuli were associated with smaller effect sizes than was audio presentation. Staging of actual social interactions was associated with the largest effects. The importance of understanding moderators of effect size for theory development is stressed.