Are we encouraging healthy self-esteem, or breeding a culture of narcissism, overconfidence, and inauthenticity when we “like,” act impressed by, or otherwise contribute to people’s inflated perceptions of their skills, knowledge, and attributes?

Overconfidence and certainty, by definition, are the enemies of critical thinking, which is the basis of intelligent judgment, problem-solving, and decision-making. Critical thinking involves curiosity, healthy doubt, and the deliberate consideration of how one’s conclusion might be wrong.

Inherent Bias Towards Overestimating One’s Own Abilities

Even without encouragement, people are inherently biased towards inaccurate, overly positive appraisals of themselves, believing they are better than their peers in terms of personality, qualities, and abilities (Zell et al., 2020). Predictably, less skillful people who perform poorly are even more likely to confidently miscalibrate their performance, overestimating how well they will do and, afterward, how well they did (Coutinho et al., 2024; Karaca et al., 2023).

Grandiose narcissists already believe they are superior to others and maintain their idealized self-image through seeking status, admiration, and dominance and doing so effectively (Kaufman et al., 2020). Blunted neural sensitivity in the error detection part of their brains further facilitates the ability to ignore contradictory evidence. (Robins et al., 2025).

Rise in Swagger Culture

A recent column in the New York Times (Sobrevilla, 2026) identified a cultural rise in swagger and a decrease in buzz about imposter syndrome.

In a social climate that rewards inflated confidence over accountability, accuracy, and appropriate humility, now, instead of imposter syndrome being in vogue, it’s normative and even popular to be an actual imposter (knowingly or not).

With imposter syndrome, people ignore evidence of their achievements and fear being exposed as a “fraud.” This phenomenon (not a medical syndrome) is associated with anxiety, perfectionism, self-doubt, and underestimating one’s competencies (Bravata et al., 2020). Not surprisingly, imposter syndrome is more prevalent among highly accomplished women adapting to the norms of environments such as academia (Feenstra et al., 2020).

Imposter syndrome proliferates in social discourse in certain contexts because it’s an easy, even desirable, condition to claim publicly since it implicitly authenticates one’s achievements and competencies, while packaging them in the humility and derogation that can feel safer, particularly to women, in competitive male-dominated environments.

In contrast, the trend we see in communal digital spaces, politically and beyond, is for people with no achievements to pose as experts, boasting with unearned confidence in the guise of a healthy belief in themselves as deserving, bolstered by likes and followers.

In an ironic, noxious reversal, arrogance is now rewarded, and sycophancy incentivized through the impact of AI, social media platforms, and the trickle-down effect of political leaders normalizing these behaviors. Whether fueled by self-deception, entitlement, or deliberate facade motivated by status seeking and self-promotion, the curated self manifests with a conspicuous absence of self-doubt, critical thinking, and, in this case, justifiable fear of being outed as a fraud. Now it’s the bystanders and benefactors who seem to fear exposing the fraudulence of the bona fide imposters.

The Role of Chatbots in Self-Aggrandizement

A recent study in Science found that chatbots are actually 50 percent more sycophantic than humans, though people falsely believe AI provides more objective feedback than humans. Researchers also found that more than a dozen major AI models were sycophantic, which is not surprising, since users preferred sycophantic responses over the models that didn’t agree with them (Cheng et al., 2026).

Further compounding the problem, people rated the sycophantic chatbots, in particular, as unbiased and accurate, and the chatbots that disagreed with them as negatively biased (Cheng et al., 2026).

This matters because even brief interactions with sycophantic chatbots have been found to increase people’s certainty, extreme views, and perceptions that they’re better or smarter than other people (Rathje et al., 2026).

Narcissism Essential Reads

A single interaction with a sycophantic chatbot has been found to adversely impact judgment, decision-making, and relationships—making people more likely to blame others, resist taking responsibility, and be convinced they were right (Rosenbluth, T., 2026). In relationships, people shifted from being empathic and open to considering their partner’s viewpoint to feeling entitled to accuse them of wrongdoing and refuse to apologize.

Psychological Motivators of the Enablers

Apart from the influence of AI, people collude in and encourage unearned confidence and inauthenticity personally, on social media, and on the political stage by supporting misleading self-promotion and egocentrism with words, likes, and follows, or implicitly through silence.

We resist exposing the truth or providing accurate feedback due to fear, cowardice, the need for self-promotion, or because it’s easier to take the path of least resistance.

A more benign contributor is a common misconception about healthy self-esteem, conflating it with narcissism, as if they were on a continuum (Brummelman & Sedikides, 2020). However, they are very distinct and cultivated through divergent socialization and parenting practices (Hyatt et al., 2028). Further, narcissism and healthy self-esteem lead to contrasting outcomes in terms of the development of psychological and emotional capacities, critical thinking, resilience, robustness, and the quality of relationships (Brummelman & Sedikides, 2020).

The Perils of Praise

Healthy self-esteem is a stable sense of self-worth. It does not involve superiority, antagonism, or status seeking, and is fostered by providing accurate feedback that emphasizes learning and self-improvement over social comparison. Narcissism, on the other hand, is nurtured by fostering overconfidence and focusing on being better than others.

Parents may unwittingly contribute to their children developing dislikable traits and narcissism by overpraising (for example, praising them no matter what they do), exaggerating how well they did, needing them to stand out, overvaluing their intelligence or specialness, rewarding the status element of their achievements, and being concerned with elevating their social status (Grapsas et al., 2020).

This parenting style, even if well-intended, later comes back to haunt parents, not only breeding narcissistic traits in their children such as entitlement, superiority, lying, cheating, and failure to take responsibility, but also making children vulnerable to emotional instability and symptoms such as rage, anxiety, and depression.

Further, children whose sense of self is built on a fragile foundation of illusion, requiring constant validation, admiration, and propping up, crash when faced with real-world situations like college or the job market where performance is judged on merit and results, and praise is not readily forthcoming.

In discussing the cultural rise in swagger, Sobrevilla (2026) argued that an inflated sense of power can be an adaptive reaction to feelings of existential dread and helplessness in our current world. But maintaining an illusion of grandiosity is not only off-putting but also a shallow, fragile fix that hooks people on constant admiration or status, at the inevitable cost of authentic connection, mastery, and resilience.