Editor’s note (April 2026): This article is part of the Blog Herald’s editorial archives. Originally published in the mid-2010s, it has been revised and updated to ensure accuracy and relevance for today’s readers.
There’s a question I’ve been debating for a while, and I think it’s worth asking outright: Is the creative economy particularly good at attracting narcissists?
Obviously, not every creator. But the structural conditions of building an online audience—the visibility, the validation loops, the real-time metrics that measure your worth—attract a certain personality type in disproportionate numbers. When building a blog or publishing business, understanding the dynamics isn’t just interesting. It is protective.
A study of the year 2025 PsyPost found that narcissistic traits directly predicted the desire to be an influencer—because the profession itself rewards self-promotion, status-seeking, and constant visibility. Conformity is structural, not random.
Narcissists often have strategies, and by understanding their likely next moves, you can save yourself unnecessary emotional distress. It’s worth knowing – especially if the person running it is an employee, brand partner or someone with access to your platform.
Why the creative economy selects for narcissistic traits
To understand risk, it helps to understand the draw. Psychologists use the term “narcissistic supply” to describe the admiration, approval, and control that narcissists seek from others. The creative economy not only enables the pursuit of these things, but also quantifies and rewards them.
Follower counts, engagement rates, brand engagement ratings—these are digital proxies for social value. 2025 analysis at IntechOpen It found that the platform’s metrics were “often internalized as indicators of self-worth, particularly among users high in narcissistic traits.” The feedback loop is immediate in a way few other professional environments offer.
The algorithm combines this. It doesn’t reward nuance or depth particularly well – it rewards engagement. Content designed to provoke, impress or create envy tends to perform. Clinical analysis from Psychotherapie Berlin noted that narcissistic influencers produce the content that keeps people on the platform the longest—meaning the platforms’ own incentives reinforce the pattern.
The result is an environment that not only attracts narcissists, but over time shapes their behavior in their direction. If you build something in that environment, you will encounter the people it creates.
What they look like – and what they actually do
The narcissists you encounter in the creative economy are rarely self-proclaimed. They come as opportunities: a collaborator who knows your audience, a brand partner who speaks your language, a creative colleague who is generous with praise and wants to align with what you’re building.
This early stage—sometimes called the “love bomb” in psychological literature—is characterized by intensity, passion, and the feeling that this person really sees your work. What’s actually happening is an assessment of your value to them. Your reach, your audience’s trust, your creative output, your industry connections: these are resources, and the narcissistic collaborator is calculating how to access them.
As long as you stay useful and relevant, the speaker tends to catch on. It changes when they set tougher conditions, push the offer back, or simply become less valuable to their agenda.
When the conduct manual loses its grip
Understanding patterns is helpful in practice. Psychology Today notes that narcissists respond to a perceived loss of control with behaviors designed to reassert dominance or punish the withdrawer. In a professional context, these behaviors occur in a recognizable sequence.
The first move is usually to play the victim. The scenario changes: you become a difficult, ungrateful, changeable person. A collaborator can tell interactions that you are leaving the project. A brand partner may portray you as unprofessional for rejecting terms they consider unfair. The goal is to make you question your own perception and protect their reputation at your expense.
It is closely related to projection. Instead of admitting their extractive behavior, they attribute these qualities to you. The person using your platform starts portraying you as an exploiter. It’s distracting, especially when it happens in shared professional spaces.
If the rearrangement doesn’t restore the dynamic, many narcissists turn to the charm—a sudden return of warmth, a renewed appreciation, reminders of everything you’ve built together. The gesture can feel genuine. It rarely happens. This is not an orientation change, but an attempt to regain lost access.
When the temptation doesn’t budge, the punishment continues: the silent treatment, exclusion from shared opportunities, or intentional damage to your professional relationships. Some will begin to compare you negatively to other creatives—more collaborative, more grateful, more professional—to restore the dynamic where you work to win their approval.
In more serious cases, the behavior escalates to active sabotage: spreading harmful stories, harming your audience or industry relationships, or even trying to influence your professional world after the relationship has ended.
Why are freelance bloggers especially exposed?
Large media organizations have institutional buffers between individuals and the people they work with—HR processes, legal teams, editorial hierarchies. Independent publishers do not. Bad collaboration is not only professionally disadvantageous; It can damage a brand that has been building for years.
There’s also something I call the platform clutter problem. Professional relationships in the creative economy are often burdensome until their nature becomes clear. A co-creator relates to your content in the opinion of your audience. Affiliate gets access to your subscriber data or editorial calendar. A colleague is introduced to your industrial relations. When a narcissistic dynamic is in full view, it can be really hard to unravel without collateral damage.
An additional finding of the PsyPost study is significant: narcissistic traits are associated with increased sensitivity to criticism and mood instability. People most attracted to creative careers are among the most fickle when those careers do not provide the constant validation they require. Who is closest to this change is you in the partnership.
Protecting your platform
The practical answer is not to be suspicious of every new relationship. Most collaborations are simple. But it’s worth establishing a few principles about how you work.
Move slowly over anything with structure. Enthusiasm is normal in the early stages of a partnership, but merging audiences, sharing access, or reaching formal agreements should happen after seeing how someone deals with disagreement and frustration—situations where your interests differ from theirs.
See how they treat people with less leverage. Narcissists tend to manage skillfully while being dismissive of people they don’t need. Persistent disdain for others in your own space is meaningful information, even if it is disguised as sincerity.
Rely on example over explanation. A single difficult interaction can have many causes. A recurring pattern—taking credit, disproportionate reactions to criticism, ending relationships with the other party always at fault—is harder to rationalize.
Dr., whose clinical work on narcissistic personality disorder has reached a wide audience in recent years. Ramani Durvasula clearly states the principle of speech: “It is not your job to fix them, change them, communicate with them or understand them. You are allowed to leave the table when respect is no longer shown.”
Your platform is built on your audience’s trust in you. Maintaining that trust requires more than good content. It requires honest judgment about the people you allow to operate and the clarity to act on what you see.
