How signature size has been linked to narcissism
By The Conversation | Published: 2025-11-02 09:00:00 | Source: Fast Company – leadership
For many years, Donald Trump’s distinctive, big, bold signature has captured the public’s attention. no It was only recently revealed That his signature appeared in a book Jeffrey Epstein received for his 50th birthday, but it fits perfectly with Trump’s long history of reckless self-adulation. “I love my signature, I really do,” he said. This came in a speech he delivered on September 30, 2025 to military leaders. “Everyone loves my signature.”
His signature also happens to be of special interest to me, given my decades-long fascination with the relationship between signature size and personality traits, and occasional academic research on the relationship between signature size and personality traits.
a long time Social psychologist Who studied the American elite, I made an unintended empirical discovery when I was a college student more than fifty years ago. The link I found then – and which has been echoed by numerous studies since – is that signature size is linked to status and an individual’s sense of self.
Sign size and self-esteem
In 1967, during my senior year in college, I was a student in the psychology library at Wesleyan University. My job, four nights a week, was to check the books and return the books that had been returned to the shelves.
When students or faculty check out books, they are asked to sign their names on an orange, unlined card included in each book.
At some point, I noticed a pattern: When faculty signed books, they used a large space to sign their names. When students revised it, they used very little space, leaving plenty of room for future readers.
So I decided to study my observation systematically.
I collected at least 10 signatures for each faculty member and compared samples of signatures of students with the same number of letters in their names. After measuring by multiplying height versus width by the amount of space used, I found that eight of the nine faculty members Uses much more space To sign their names
To test for age and status, I conducted another study in which I compared the signatures of blue-collar workers such as custodians and groundskeepers who worked at the school with a sample of professors and a sample of students—and the number of letters was matched again, but this time on blank 3-by-5-inch cards. The workers used more space than the students but less than the faculty. She concluded that age had an influence, but status also had an influence.
When I told psychologist Carl Shippey, my favorite professor, about my findings, he said I could measure signatures in his books, which he had been signing for more than a decade since his first year in college.
As can be seen in graphHis book signings have mostly gotten larger. They made a big jump in size from his junior year to his senior year, decreased slightly when he entered graduate school, and then increased in size when he completed his doctorate and joined the faculty at Wesleyan.
I I did a few More studiesI published some articles and concluded that the size of the signature is related to self-esteem and a measure of who I am It’s called “situational awareness.” I have found that this pattern exists in a number of different environments, Including in Iran– Where people write from right to left.
Narcissism connection
Despite my subsequent research It included a book about CEOs of Fortune 500 companiesIt never occurred to me to look at the signatures of these CEOs.
However, this idea crossed the minds of some researchers 40 years later. In May 2013, I received a phone call from a magazine editor Harvard Business Review Because of the work I did on signature size. Planned post Interview Nick Seibertassociate professor of accounting at the University of Maryland, on the possible relationship between… Sign size and narcissism In CEOs.
While Siebert told me that his research found no direct evidence of a positive relationship between the two, the possibility of the relationship he concluded intrigued me nonetheless.
So I decided to test this using a sample of my students. I asked them to sign a blank 3 x 5 card as if they were writing a check, and then I gave it to them The widely used 16-item Narcissism Scale.
Seibert was right to conclude that there was a connection: there was a significant positive correlation between signature size and narcissism. Although my sample size was small, the correlation later prompted Seibert to test two different samples of his students. And he The same significant positive relationship was found.
Soon others started to do so Using signature size to assess narcissism in CEOs. By 2020, there has been increased interest in the topic Management Journal Publish an article Which included signature size as one of five ways to measure narcissism among CEOs.
A growing field
Now, nearly six years later, researchers have used signature size Exploring narcissism in CEOs and Other senior positions in the company such as CFO. The link is found not only in the United States but in countries including UK, Germany, Uruguay, Iran, South Africaand China.
In addition, some researchers have studied the impact of larger versus smaller signatures on viewers. For example, in a recent article in the Journal of Philanthropy, Canadian researchers reported on three studies that systematically varied the signature size of someone seeking money in order to see if that affected the size of donations. I did. In one of their studies, they found that increasing the size of the sender’s signature More than doubled revenue.
The surprising resurgence of research using signature size to assess narcissism leads me to some conclusions.
For example, signature size as a measure of certain aspects of personality turns out to be much more powerful than I imagined when I was a committed undergraduate working in a college library in 1967.
In fact, signature size is not just an indicator of status and self-esteem, as I once concluded. It is also, as recent studies indicate, an indicator of narcissistic tendencies That many argue Displayed by Trump’s big, bold signature.
Where this research will be conducted next is anyone’s guess, least of all to someone who noticed something interesting about the size of the signature many years ago.
Richie Zwigenhaft He is Professor Emeritus of Psychology at Guilford College.
This article was republished from Conversation Under Creative Commons license. Read Original article.
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(Tags for translation)Narcissism
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