Narcissism, happiness and self actualization

Happiness is supposed to be the ultimate goal of life and hence considered very important in life. Whatever action is done by human being is ultimately to be happy. Aristotle called it the summum bonnum or chief good in life. In recent times people have not become happier than earlier generations even though there is a drastic improvement in technology and lifestyle standards. Increasing narcissism as found out by some researchers may be one of the causes of this. Self-actualization need which forms the apex of the famous hierarchy of needs theory propounded by Maslow is supposed to make a person very grounded and happy by focussing on the fulfillment of his potential as against social approval which the narcissists crave so much. In this study the relationship between self-actualization, narcissism and happiness has been studied empirically. The data was collected from 200 respondents from across India using established scales to measure these three constructs, and analyze their relationship. As predicted by the literature, it was found that higher level of self-actualization led to lower level of narcissism. Also, narcissism and happiness are negatively related to each other, whereas self-actualization is positively related with happiness. The `r' values for all these relations were quite strong and significant (p = 0.05) at above 0.4 for the first two and above 0.6 for the last relationship.