The Covert Narcissist Test

Every result, explained

The Covert Narcissist Test scores vulnerable narcissism on the HSNS and places the score in one of four tiers against published norms.

• The Functional Self

  Vulnerable narcissism does not register on this instrument.

  Your HSNS score sits in the bottom 16% of the norm sample. The construct of vulnerable / covert narcissism, hypersensitivity to slights, shame-based grandiosity, the secret reservoir of contempt for people who ask for your sympathy, is not registering as your operating system. You may have arrived here because someone called you a covert narcissist in an argument, or because the worry has been quietly chewing through you for months. The result is the result.

• Average-Range

  Within the broad middle of the norm sample.

  Your HSNS score sits in the broad middle band, ±1 SD from the mean. Some hypersensitivity to ridicule, some self-consciousness in groups, some interpretation of remarks in personal terms, all in the normal range, what the literature describes as the everyday human portion of the construct rather than the pathological one.

• The Hypersensitive

  Vulnerable narcissism is registering. The quiet version of the loud disorder.

  Your HSNS score sits in roughly the top 16% of the norm sample. Vulnerable / covert narcissism is registering. This is the part of narcissism that the NPI-40 systematically underreads, the hypersensitivity, the shame-based grandiosity, the secret contempt for the people whose sympathy you require. The classical descriptions are by Akhtar 1989, Pincus et al. 2009, and (more accessibly) Malkin's 2015 *Rethinking Narcissism*.

• The Hidden Layer

  Top 2-3%. The fully-organised covert configuration.

  Your HSNS score sits in roughly the top 2-3% of the norm sample. The full vulnerable-narcissistic configuration is registering, hypersensitivity, shame-based grandiosity, contempt-for-the-needy, the secret feeling of temperamental superiority that lives underneath the public posture of being a person who takes things hard. This is the configuration the more recent narcissism literature (Pincus 2009, Krizan & Herlache 2018) takes most seriously and that the NPI-40 most reliably misses.

Nothing on these pages is a diagnosis. A result describes a pattern of answers on a self-report instrument; only a clinician can diagnose, and only with a proper assessment.