The False Persona: Why Narcissists Care More About Appearances Than People

Yes. How fearful someone is related to their temperament. You can have a shy temperament and still be narcissistic. You can also be adventurous or fearless and be narcissistic.

What makes someone narcissistic is that they care more for how they appear to others than they do about people. In a sense, their facade, or persona as conceived in other people’s minds feels to them as if it is an extension of their actual self. And they feel entitled to protect that self and to be perceived according to their inflated sense of self. So they feel animosity towards and challenged by others' psychological freedom to perceive reality. In other words, they require others to acclimate to their narrative and often feel entitled to do whatever it takes to make that happen. Not perceiving a narcissist in alignment with their inflated sense of self feels like an assault to the narcissist’s actual person.

If they are less malignant, they will care a bit more about people vs. their inflated self-narrative. The more malignant they are, the more drastically they’ll care about the narrative vs. how they affect others, and as they become more malignant, the more pleasure they get from harming people and feeling exalted. They feel exalted by comparing themselves to the people they’ve harmed, and by controlling the…