Does Religiosity Reduce Narcissistic Personality Disorder? Examining the Case of Muslim University Students

The purpose of this study was to examine the influences of religiousness on the prevalence of Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD) among young adults. Prevalence of three forms of Allportian religious orientation, three forms of quest religious orientation and seven symptoms of NPD were examined through self-reported measures. 618 randomly selected Muslim students from the four public sector Pakistani universities participated in the study. Three research instruments comprising Religious Orientation Scale developed by Gorsuch and McPherson, Quest Scale developed by Batson and Schoenrade and Narcissistic Personality Inventory developed by Raskin and Terry were used to collect the data. All subscales demonstrated more than .70 Cronbach Alpha Coefficients. The findings demonstrate comparatively higher presence of intrinsic, extrinsic personal and extrinsic social religious orientations among the Pakistani Muslim young adults. The presence of NPD symptoms remains higher among the participants too. The study concludes that the religious orientations significantly explain the variances in the prevalence of NPD symptoms among the Muslim university students with the direct effects of intrinsic and extrinsic personal religious orientations and indirect effects of quest religious orientations.