Narcissist Test
A free 20-question narcissist test covering grandiose and covert traits. Instant results, no email, nothing leaves your browser — and it is a self-reflection quiz, not a diagnosis.
This is a self-reflection exercise, not a diagnostic tool. It cannot tell you whether you or anyone else has narcissistic personality disorder. NPD is diagnosed only by a qualified clinician after a proper assessment. High scores on trait quizzes are common and do not mean you have a disorder.
I think I'm more talented than most of the people around me.
Answer for how you usually are, not how you were on your worst day. Keys 1–5 work too. Takes about two minutes.
Nothing leaves your browser. There is no account, no email, no tracking of your answers and no server call. The scoring happens in JavaScript on your own device, and closing the tab erases it.
Grandiose and covert traits, side by side
Most people arrive here picturing one kind of person: loud, boastful, impossible to interrupt. That is the grandiose pattern, and it is only half the story. The covert pattern — also called vulnerable narcissism — runs on the same wish to be seen as special, but it shows up as thin skin and quiet resentment instead of noise. The same person can move between the two depending on how the week is going, which is why this test scores both rather than picking one.
| In practice | Grandiose | Covert / vulnerable |
|---|---|---|
| Self-image | Said out loud, often | Private, and rarely admitted |
| After criticism | Argues back or attacks | Withdraws, stings for days |
| In a group | Takes the floor | Feels overlooked in the corner |
| Envy | Assumes others envy them | Resents what others were given |
| First impression | Charming, then tiring | Modest, even self-deprecating |
| Usually mistaken for | Confidence or ambition | Shyness, anxiety or low self-worth |
Neither column is a diagnosis, and neither is rare. The trait themes in both are ones most people recognize in themselves on a bad week. What the columns are good for is naming a pattern you had no word for — which is usually what people are actually looking for when they search for a covert narcissist test.
Worried about someone else?
Most people searching for a narcissist test for a partner, husband, boyfriend or mother are not asking about themselves. A quiz cannot answer that question — you would be scoring your guesses about someone else's inner life, usually while hurt. What you can do is describe the behavior accurately. These are the patterns that come up most often in relationships where one person has strong narcissistic traits:
- •Conversations reliably end up being about them, including your bad news.
- •Your memory of events gets contradicted so often that you stop trusting it.
- •Warmth arrives in bursts and gets withdrawn as punishment.
- •Apologies are conditional: sorry you felt that way, sorry but you made me.
- •Criticism of any size triggers rage, silence for days, or a counterattack.
- •Friends, family and money slowly get routed through them.
- •You rehearse sentences before saying them, to avoid setting something off.
If it is a parent
Searches for a covert narcissist mother test come from adults trying to name something that started before they had words for it. A parent is harder to read than a partner, because you have no version of family life to compare it with. The things people describe most often:
- •Your achievements were repackaged as theirs, and your problems as an inconvenience to them.
- •Affection depended on how well you performed that month.
- •One child could do nothing wrong and another could do nothing right, and the roles could swap.
- •Illness, exhaustion or martyrdom appeared whenever attention moved elsewhere.
- •Raising any of this now gets you told you were a difficult child, or that it never happened.
You do not need a label on your parent to be allowed to set limits with them. Describing what happened is enough, and a therapist can work with that without ever diagnosing someone who is not in the room.
What people mean by a narcissistic abuse test
There is no validated test for having been on the receiving end of this, and any site offering one is guessing. What clinicians do look at is the aftermath, which tends to look less like heartbreak and more like a stress injury: second-guessing your own memory, apologizing reflexively, difficulty making small decisions, jumpiness at a certain tone of voice, and a shrunken sense of who you were before. Sleep and appetite often go first.
Those reactions are treatable and they are not a character flaw. Trauma-informed therapy, CBT and EMDR are the approaches most commonly used, and the first step is usually the dullest one: writing down what actually happened, in order, while you still remember it clearly. Getting a label onto the other person is optional. Getting your own account back is not.
What actually helps
- →Keep a plain, dated record of incidents. It protects your own memory more than any label does.
- →Talk to a therapist about the relationship, not about diagnosing them. A label you cannot confirm changes nothing; a plan does.
- →Rebuild outside contact — one friend, one family member, one activity that is yours.
- →Decide what you need to change, and state it as behavior: what stops, what starts.
If you are being hurt or you are in crisis, get help now. In the US, call or text 988for the Suicide & Crisis Lifeline, or call the National Domestic Violence Hotline at 1-800-799-7233 (text START to 88788). Outside the US, contact your local emergency number or crisis line. Threats, intimidation and control are abuse regardless of what any personality label says.
About this narcissist test
How it works
Twenty first-person statements, rated from strongly disagree to strongly agree. Each one is worth 0 to 4 points, so the maximum is 80, shown as a percentage. The statements were written in plain language around the trait themes psychologists keep returning to when they study narcissism: grandiosity, need for admiration, entitlement, low empathy, using people, envy, arrogance, and the hypersensitivity that marks the covert side.
Your total lands in one of three bands — low, moderate or elevated trait levels. Below that, each cluster gets its own bar, because a single tall bar next to six short ones tells you more than the total does. This is not a licensed instrument and it produces no diagnosis; it is a structured way of asking yourself questions you would otherwise skip.
Where the questions come from
Researchers have spent decades arguing about how to measure this, and the argument is useful background for anyone taking a narcissist test online. The Narcissistic Personality Inventory arrived in 1979 from Raskin and Hall, was trimmed to 40 forced-choice pairs by Raskin and Terry in 1988, and still supplies most of the narcissism scores you see in psychology papers. Its own authors say it measures everyday, subclinical narcissism and is not a diagnostic instrument.
The gap it left was the quiet version. Hendin and Cheek published the ten-item Hypersensitive Narcissism Scale in 1997 after noticing that vulnerable narcissism barely registered on the NPI — the two scales correlate near zero. Later work, including the Pathological Narcissism Inventory, treats grandiosity and vulnerability as two sides of one thing rather than two different people.
This test is written independently and copies no published scale, but it is organized around the same trait themes those researchers keep landing on, and it reports the covert side separately for the reason Hendin and Cheek found: a grandiose-only score misses a lot of people.
How it compares with other narcissist tests online
Free narcissist tests are everywhere and most of them are one of three things: a version of the NPI or its 16-item short form, a magazine-style quiz with no scale behind it, or a funnel that holds your result behind an email address and then sells a report. The third kind is worth closing immediately. The first kind is genuinely worth taking — a second instrument asking different questions is a better reality check than retaking the same one.
Where they differ from this page: NPI-based tests use forced-choice pairs, pick one statement or the other, which some people find easier and some find maddening when neither fits. They also score grandiose traits only. This one uses a five-point agreement scale, splits the result into seven trait clusters, and gives the covert pattern its own number. None of them, including this one, produce a diagnosis or a result anyone else should be shown as proof.
Men, women and the female narcissist question
The stereotype says narcissism is a male trait. The evidence says the gap is real but smaller and narrower than that. Grijalva and colleagues pooled 355 studies covering more than 470,000 people in 2015 and found men scored modestly higher on grandiose narcissism, with almost all of the difference sitting in entitlement and in a pull toward authority. Exhibitionism showed close to no gender difference, and vulnerable narcissism showed none at all.
That last point matters for anyone searching for a female covert narcissist test. There is no separate female instrument and no separate set of traits; the same themes apply, and the quiet pattern is distributed evenly. Researchers have also raised the possibility that women with vulnerable narcissistic traits get read as something else in clinical settings, which is one more reason to treat any self-scored number as a starting point for a conversation rather than an answer.
Am I a narcissist?
Almost everyone who types that question is worried enough about their effect on other people that the answer is probably no — genuine lack of concern for that effect is one of the things the question rules out. Narcissism sits on a scale and everyone is somewhere on it. A bit of it helps: you need some self-belief to ask for a raise, start something, or recover from being turned down.
It becomes a problem when the traits are rigid rather than situational, when they show up everywhere instead of under stress, and when the people closest to you keep paying for them. That is the line between a personality trait and a personality disorder, and it takes a clinician to draw it.
Narcissism vs NPD
Narcissistic traits are common. NPD is not — estimates put it at roughly 1 to 2 percent of the population. The diagnosis requires a lasting pattern of grandiosity, need for admiration and lack of empathy, visible by early adulthood, across situations, causing impairment. A clinician assesses it through interview and history, not a questionnaire, and they rule out the many other things that produce similar behavior: mania, substance use, trauma responses, or simply a bad year.
This matters because "narcissist" has drifted into everyday speech as a word for anyone selfish or difficult. Using it that way makes it harder to describe what someone is actually doing to you, which is the part that counts.
When to talk to a professional
If the patterns here match your life and are costing you — relationships that end the same way, anger that surprises you afterwards, a sense of emptiness under the confidence, or a partner who keeps saying they feel invisible — talk to a therapist or your doctor. Narcissistic traits respond to therapy when the person is willing to look at them, and the willingness is most of the work. Noticing the pattern yourself is a better starting point than most people ever get.
You do not need a score, a label or a printout to book that appointment. "Something in how I handle people keeps costing me" is a complete reason, and it is one a therapist hears constantly. If cost is the obstacle, sliding-scale clinics, employee assistance programs and university training clinics all exist for this. And if you are in crisis, or being hurt by someone, use the numbers in the red box above before anything else on this page.
Six ways people misread a result like this
Treating the percentage as a diagnosis
It is a sum of your own ratings, nothing more. A high number means you agreed with a lot of statements, which is a fact about your answers, not a clinical finding about you.
Taking it on your worst day
Self-focus climbs during burnout, grief, a breakup or a stretch of feeling invisible. Answer for how you usually are. If you want a fairer read, take it again in a month and compare.
Answering as the person you want to be
The quickest way to make this useless. Nobody sees the result, there is no account and nothing is stored, so there is nothing to protect by shading an answer.
Filling it in on behalf of a partner
Every statement asks about an inner experience you cannot observe from the outside. What comes back is a score of your guesses, usually made while hurt, and it will feel more authoritative than it is.
Reading only the total
One tall cluster next to six short ones says far more than the total does. Somebody high on hypersensitivity and low on everything else is in a different position from somebody spread evenly.
Using the word as a weapon
Once "narcissist" becomes the label, the conversation stops being about what someone actually did. Describing the behavior gets you further, with a therapist, a lawyer or the person themselves.
Frequently asked questions
Is this narcissist test free, and do I need an email?
It is free and there is no sign-up, no email and no paywall on the results. You answer 20 questions and the score appears on the same page.
How many questions are on this narcissist test, and how long does it take?
Twenty statements, about two minutes. Each one is rated on a five-point scale from strongly disagree to strongly agree, and you can press keys 1 to 5 instead of clicking. You can step back and change an answer at any point, and the results appear the moment you finish the last question.
What is the difference between narcissism and NPD?
Narcissism is a set of personality traits that everyone has to some degree — a bit of self-belief and a wish to be admired is normal and often useful. Narcissistic personality disorder (NPD) is a clinical diagnosis: the traits have to be rigid, long-standing, present across many situations, and causing real damage to the person or the people around them. Scoring high on a quiz says nothing about whether that threshold is met. Only a qualified clinician can make that call, after an interview and a history.
What is a covert or vulnerable narcissist test measuring?
The covert (also called vulnerable) pattern is the quieter version: instead of loud self-promotion you get thin skin, resentment at being overlooked, withdrawal after criticism, and a private sense of being special that rarely gets said out loud. Four of the questions here target that pattern, and the results show it as its own bar so you can see whether your traits lean grandiose, covert, or both.
Can I use this as a test for my partner, husband or someone else?
Not reliably. The questions ask about your own inner experience, and nobody can answer those from the outside — you would be scoring your guesses about them. If you are worried about someone, read the relationship section below, which lists what the behavior actually looks like from the receiving end. That is more useful than a number. It also holds up where a quiz result never will: a score carries no weight in a custody case, a legal dispute or a conversation with a doctor, whereas a dated record of what was said and done does.
How accurate is an online narcissist test?
Treat it as a mirror, not a measurement. Self-report quizzes depend entirely on how honestly and how harshly you rate yourself, and people with the strongest narcissistic traits are often the least likely to answer against themselves. Research instruments used by psychologists are longer, have been checked against real samples, and are still only one input among many. This one is a prompt for reflection, and no online narcissist test can give you a result that counts as proof of anything.
Is this the same as the Psychology Today or NPI narcissist test?
No. It is written independently and is not a copy of any published scale. The Narcissistic Personality Inventory, first published by Raskin and Hall in 1979 and cut to 40 forced-choice pairs by Raskin and Terry in 1988, is the instrument most research narcissism scores come from, and several free sites run versions of it. Those tests are worth taking too. The difference here is that the covert side gets its own score, because the NPI was built around grandiose traits and correlates close to zero with the scales that measure the vulnerable pattern.
Do narcissistic traits look different in women?
The research picture is that the gap is smaller than the stereotype suggests and depends on which traits you look at. A 2015 meta-analysis by Grijalva and colleagues, pooling more than 470,000 people across 355 studies, found men scored somewhat higher on grandiose narcissism, with the difference concentrated in entitlement and in a drive toward authority. On exhibitionism the difference was close to nothing, and on vulnerable narcissism there was no meaningful difference between men and women at all. So a female narcissist test is not a separate instrument; it is the same trait themes, and the quieter covert pattern is worth as much attention as the loud one.
Can a narcissist pass a lie detector test?
Possibly, but so can plenty of other people, which is the real problem. A polygraph records breathing, pulse, sweat and blood pressure. It measures arousal, not truth, so anyone who stays calm while lying can read as honest and anyone who panics while telling the truth can read as deceptive. Research on concealed-information testing has also found that people scoring higher on narcissism report using countermeasures more often. Polygraph results are inadmissible in most US courts for good reason, and they are not a way to settle an argument in a relationship.
I scored high. Should I be worried?
High scores on trait quizzes are common and are not a verdict on you. Self-focus also rises during stress, grief, burnout and big life changes. The question worth sitting with is whether these patterns are costing you — friendships that fade out, the same argument on repeat, a partner who keeps saying they feel unseen. If the answer is yes, a therapist is the right next step, and narcissistic traits do respond to therapy when someone is willing to look at them.
Can narcissistic traits change?
Yes, and they often do on their own. Grandiose traits tend to soften with age as life delivers the ordinary corrections it delivers to everybody. Therapy helps when the person is willing to stay in the room during the uncomfortable parts, which is the hard bit rather than the technique. Nobody can change someone else’s traits for them, and waiting for that is the most common way people lose years.
Does the test store my answers?
No. Everything runs in your browser. Your answers are never sent to a server, never saved to your device, and vanish when you close the tab or hit retake. There is no email gate on the results and no report to buy afterwards.