Educational use only. Built on the Narcissistic Personality Inventory (NPI-40), Raskin & Terry 1988. Measures grandiose narcissism specifically. Not a diagnosis. Only a licensed clinician with a full history can diagnose Narcissistic Personality Disorder.

Calibrated · NPI-40

The Narcissist Test

Calibrated by the NPI-40. Read by a real one.

Forty forced-choice items. The NPI-40 is scored two ways here: the total against US college samples, 1990s to 2000s (M 15.3, SD 6.8; Twenge et al. 2008 pooled 85 college samples, means 15.1 to 17.3), and as Ackerman et al.'s 2011 three factors, Leadership/Authority, Grandiose Exhibitionism and Entitlement/Exploitativeness, against that paper's college sample (n = 353). Fifteen of the forty items load on none of the three and count toward the total only. The same instrument the field has used for thirty-five years, read the way the field reads it now, which is the part no other quiz site bothers with.

40 items
About 8 minutes to complete
3 factors
Begin Assessment

Free. The total against the norm, and the three factors under it. The complete report is $9.99.

The Three Factors

Ackerman and colleagues tested the NPI’s structure against 19,001 college students in 2011 and found three factors that replicate and that mean different things. Which of them your total is made of is what you actually want to know.

Leadership/Authority
11 items · Agency

Leading, influence, being recognised as an authority. In the 2011 study this factor travelled with self-esteem, extraversion and lower social anxiety, not with damage. It is the part of the total that reads as agency, and reporting it inside a single narcissism number is what makes that number hard to interpret.

Grandiose Exhibitionism
10 items · Display

Attention, showing off, the mirror, the body. The part of grandiose narcissism visible from across the room. It tracked impulsivity rather than self-esteem, and it is not the part that costs other people.

Entitlement/Exploitativeness
4 items · Cost

Manipulating people, insisting on the respect due to you, expecting a great deal, never satisfied until you get what you deserve. The smallest factor and the only one that tied to exploitation and impulsivity and to nothing adaptive. Four items is a short scale, so one answer moves a band.

Which factors clear their own line names the result: the Functional Self · the Sovereign · the Performer · the Charmer · the Full Pattern. Your result page returns the total against the norm, all three factor counts, and the profile the three make together.

Who built this

Kanika Rose · Diagnosed ASPD · Author

The NPI is the most-cited self-report measure of grandiose narcissism in the academic literature, the reference instrument every other narcissism quiz on the internet derives from. Its items have been published since 1988 and tested in dozens of populations.

The difference here is not in the items, which are Raskin and Terry’s with only punctuation harmonisation. It is in the scoring. Most sites still report the NPI as one number, or split it on the seven components from 1988 that nobody has reproduced since. This one keeps the total for its norm and reads the structure through the three factors that replicate, which is the only way a high score can say whether it is made of agency or of cost.

Source instrument: Raskin, R., & Terry, H. (1988). A principal-components analysis of the Narcissistic Personality Inventory and further evidence of its construct validity. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 54(5), 890-902.

Factor structure: Ackerman, Witt, Donnellan, Trzesniewski, Robins and Kashy (2011). What does the Narcissistic Personality Inventory really measure? Assessment, 18(1), 67-87.

How it works

01

Forty forced-choice items

Each item shows two statements; you pick the one that describes you better. Forced-choice is how the NPI was validated; Likert adaptations exist but compromise calibration.

02

Total, then the three factors

A total of 0 to 40 against US college norms, then the items endorsed on each of Ackerman et al.'s three factors: Leadership/Authority (11), Grandiose Exhibitionism (10), Entitlement/Exploitativeness (4). Fifteen items load on none and count toward the total only.

03

The profile the three make

Which factors clear their own +1 SD line names the result: Functional Self, the Sovereign, the Performer, the Charmer, the Full Pattern. Each gets a long-form read on the results page.

Take the Assessment

Frequently Asked Questions

The Narcissist Test is a 40-item forced-choice assessment built on the Narcissistic Personality Inventory (NPI-40, Raskin and Terry 1988). It gives you a total, read against US college norms (M 15.3, SD 6.8; Twenge et al. 2008 pooled 85 college samples, means 15.1 to 17.3), and then reads the total's structure through the three factors Ackerman et al. found in 2011: Leadership/Authority (11 items, the agentic part that tracks self-esteem), Grandiose Exhibitionism (10 items, the display part) and Entitlement/Exploitativeness (4 items, the part that costs other people). Fifteen of the forty items load on none of the three and count toward the total only.
No. The NPI is a research instrument, not a diagnostic one, and it does not measure Narcissistic Personality Disorder. Only a licensed clinician with a full history can diagnose that. What this assessment can do is give you a calibrated read against published norms on grandiose narcissism as a trait, which is useful for self-recognition or partner-recognition. It is not useful for self-labelling and we will not help you use it that way.
Raskin and Terry's 1988 seven-factor solution (authority, self-sufficiency, superiority, exhibitionism, exploitativeness, vanity, entitlement) has not been reproduced by anyone since. Ackerman, Witt, Donnellan, Trzesniewski, Robins and Kashy (2011, Assessment) tested it against 19,001 college students and found three factors that replicate, and, more importantly, that they mean different things: Leadership/Authority went with self-esteem and extraversion, Entitlement/Exploitativeness with exploitation and impulsivity. A total that adds those together is adding agency to damage. This test keeps the total for the norm and reads the three factors for the meaning.
The NPI-40 measures grandiose narcissism: confidence, dominance, exhibitionism, the loud version. The Covert Narcissist Test (/quiz/covert-narcissist) measures vulnerable narcissism on the HSNS: hypersensitivity, shame-based grandiosity, the quiet version. The two correlate near zero at low grandiosity (Jauk et al. 2022), so a low score here is low on grandiose narcissism as the NPI measures it and nothing more. If you scored high on the cost factor and low on leadership here, the covert test is the next call.
Because that is how the NPI was validated. Raskin and Terry built and tested it as forced choice; Likert adaptations exist but break the calibration to the original norms. Sticking with forced choice keeps the result interpretable against the reference data the field uses.
Kanika Rose, clinically diagnosed with Antisocial Personality Disorder, author of the Sociopathic Dating Bible. The instrument (NPI-40) is the academic standard; the items are reproduced from Raskin and Terry 1988 with only punctuation harmonisation, and the factor scoring follows Ackerman et al. 2011 item for item. The voice of the result-page interpretations is mine; the instrument is the field's.
You have configured as The Sovereign: the agentic factor lit without the cost factor. In the 2011 study Leadership/Authority tracked self-esteem, extraversion and lower social anxiety, and Entitlement/Exploitativeness tracked exploitation and impulsivity; you scored on the first and not the second. Most of what your total is calling narcissism is agency. The result page lays out what that means and what to watch for.
You have configured as The Charmer: the four entitlement and exploitativeness items lit without the confidence factor underneath them. This is the NPI shape most likely to sit beside a high score on the covert test, which uses a different instrument (the HSNS) built for exactly that pattern. The next call is that test.
Not directly. This is a self-report; your partner has to take it for it to score them. What you can do is read the five profiles on the results-explained pages and recognise the configuration in someone you know, or use Read Someone, the observer version of the Dark Mirror. The partner-detection chapters of the Sociopathic Dating Bible go further; they are built for that question specifically.
Stored in your browser session by default, plus one row on our servers so your result has a link you can return to. We do not sell or share quiz responses. If you register an account or capture your result by email, the data lives under the same access controls as any registered-user data and you can request deletion at any time.
Yes, with one caveat. People who are actively worried they might be narcissistic are rarely the ones the grandiose scale is built to detect; the worry itself is weak evidence against that kind. It is no evidence at all about the vulnerable kind, which is the one that worries, so take the covert test as well. Both will give you a calibrated answer, which is more useful than the worry, and you can take either to a clinician if anything in the result genuinely surprised you.

Related reading

Companion quiz

The Covert Narcissist Test (HSNS)

The companion test. Where the NPI-40 measures the loud version of narcissism, the HSNS measures the quiet one, vulnerable narcissism, hypersensitivity, shame-based grandiosity. Many people score low here and high there.

Sister quiz

The Sociopath Test (LSRP)

Measures psychopathy on two subscales (Primary, Secondary). The narcissism and psychopathy literatures are deeply intertwined; people who score high on Entitlement/Exploitativeness here often score high on Primary Psychopathy there.

Wide map

The Dark Mirror Assessment

The wide map: profiles you across six Cluster B types instead of one. Take this if you want to see how your narcissism axis sits in the broader personality landscape.

Book

The Sociopathic Dating Bible

Long-form. The chapters on the narcissist's interior were written by an author with an adjacent diagnosis (ASPD, not NPD) and they will read as either familiar or accusatory depending on where in the configuration you currently are.

Guide

Narcissism: the complete guide

Grandiose and vulnerable narcissism, the NPD criteria, and the difference between a trait and a disorder.

Full disclaimer

Educational and reflective use only. The NPI is a research instrument, not a diagnostic one, and it measures grandiose narcissism specifically: a low score is low on grandiose narcissism as the NPI measures it, and says nothing about vulnerable or covert narcissism, which a different scale (the HSNS, on /quiz/covert-narcissist) reads. Only a licensed clinician with a full history can diagnose Narcissistic Personality Disorder.

How this test is scored
The instrument
The Narcissistic Personality Inventory, NPI-40 (Raskin and Terry 1988). 40 items.
How it is scored
Forty forced-choice pairs; the narcissistic statement in each pair counts one, for a total out of forty.
What it is compared against
US college samples: pooled means run 15.1 to 17.3 with an SD near 6.9 across 1982 to 2006 (Twenge et al. 2008). Scores have fallen since about 2000 and vary by region (Oberleiter et al. 2025).
What the research says is wrong with it
The NPI reads grandiose narcissism only and correlates near zero with the vulnerable form (Jauk et al. 2022, N=10,519), and Raskin and Terry's seven factors did not replicate: three did (Ackerman et al. 2011).
What a result is not
A result here is a trait profile, never a disorder and never a diagnosis. Only a clinician with your full history can diagnose anything, and no self-report questionnaire can.