Narcissism: are accounting students using their personality traits to perform better?

The purpose of this research was to identify if non-athological narcissistic personality traits in accounting students are related to their performance. Students who overestimate their performance, a characteristic present in narcissistic individuals, live in the unrealistic belief that they do better than others in different activities. Such tendency can be detrimental in the long term. In addition to resulting in a constant effort so that such expectations become reality. The data were collected from a sample of 106 Brazilian accounting students who responded to a survey that included the Narcissistic Personality Inventory (NPI). The results suggest that the higher the presence of narcissistic traits, the greater his/her self-perceived academic performance. At the same time, narcissism does not influence the student’s real performance, which suggest that narcissistic personality traits just influence expectations, reather than the learning process.