Homosexuality and narcissism

College males were asked the following questions while participating in the Longitudinal Study of Violence Against Women:

1. "I feel that 'I'm the greatest' and better than other people."
2. "I brag a lot about myself and what I do."
3. "I am a self-centered person. I want things to go my way."
4. "I remind myself that I'm "number one" and have to look out for myself first."
5. "I am better at doing most things than other people."


Answers ranged from "not at all like me" to "very much like me." I correlated the answers, and Cronbach's alpha was .76. Cronbach's indicates how well a set of items measures a single, underlying construct, and .76 is pretty good. So I summed the items and called it a narcissism scale. Next, I lumped gay and bisexual men together to increase N, and calculated means. For the gay group it is 12.00 (n = 39), and for straights it's 10.42 (n = 708). The differences are statistically significant (p < .05, two-tail).