A correlation between megacultism and (trait) entitled narcissism?

I have a pre-theory about this. Most of these megacult doctrines - and especially their central assertions about unbelievers/infidel/atheists - are highly offensive. Yet the (admittedly sometimes delusional) proponents of these doctrines seem completely numb to the offensiveness. Otherwise, they seem to avidly embrace and relish it, and this disposition is encoded into the doctrinal narratives of their megacult.

The hypothesis of the pre-theory is that they're in fact entitled narcissists, and that is partly what the doctrinal narratives are designed to leverage.

In this paper by Adams et al., the authors propose that narcissism and swearing are correlated and that there is a causal relationship. In fact I think that the research question and design are highly problematic. The sample size is only 602, but that's less troublesome than the likely confounders. One is mischievous reporting. It is possible - likely even -that the participants - IFF they were narcissists at all - were not accurately reporting their behaviour, but feeding off the questions and 'showing off'.

Another problem is the soundness of the premise and hypothesis in the first place. It seems just as easily to be the case the authors are conservatives and/or religionists, and just don't like people who use coarse speech. These two problems alone are very hard to correct for, and the second one is a serious issue.

The study needs to be done naturalistically. A good approach might be to get hold of the social media accounts of 2000 confidently known narcissists with a sound diagnosis, and do digital psychological analysis of their social media output. Great care would have to be taken to control for lots of possible mediating and intermediate variables - like cultural background, parents and personal culture, and education level.

Not all swearers are equal, and there can be very good reasons for rejecting social etiquette. For example - women rejecting the impositions of a conservative Islamic megacult state would be perceived by most of their community as an affront to social etiquette. In that case - however - it is likely the state religionists that are the true entitled narcissists and the real problem. In fact this is in line with my hypothesis and pre-theory.

Islamic megacult communities, and all fundamentalist megacult communities (conservative, misatheist Christian megacultists, for example) are completely accepting of the highly offensive nature of their assertions about unbelievers. The Christian megacult even has this written into its narratives, since the 'gospel' is said to be a rock of offense to those who are 'perishing' (a reflexive restatement of the very offensive 'unbelievers go to hell' memetic narrative!) It's unsurprising that the grifter-enabler element in megacults (clerics and evangelists, for example) have evolved megacult doctrinal narratives over millennia to leverage and harness the bitterness, jealousy, and tall poppyism of the average delusional believer.

So the hypothesis is that misatheist theist megacultists are entitled narcissists, and that this is demonstrated by their doctrines and habitual behaviour: being constantly insensitively offensive to, and derogatory of, unbelief and unbelievers. There is a LOT more historical, textual, digital, and social media data about this available. (Moreover, if one did a self-report based experiment, then I suggest megacultists would be very likely to accurately report their offensive attitude towards unbelief.)

Hermann et. al., in a 2018 paper, make the common move of holding religious belief to be neutral - not causally interactive - with respect to trait narcissism. They investigate the idea that trait narcissists do religion and spirituality differently to non-narcissists. I strongly suspect this is too simple at best, and that it is more likely another case of the theory crisis manifesting itself, and involves a form of confirmation-bias-cum-HARKing. The semantic content of theist megacult narratives is intrinsically about the specialness of the believer in relation to the universe and to non-believers (this is all but undeniable on any reasonable assessment). So there is almost certainly a causal relationship between narcissism and the contents of the megacult doxastic commitments.

References

Adams, J. M., Florell, D., Alex Burton, K., & Hart, W. (2014). Why do narcissists disregard social-etiquette norms? A test of two explanations for why narcissism relates to offensive-language use. Personality and Individual Differences, 58, 26–30. https://doi.org/10.1016/J.PAID.2013.09.027

Ardi, R., & Budiarti, D. (2020). The role of religious beliefs and collective narcissism in interreligious contact on university students. Heliyon, 6(9), e04939.

Cooper, M. J., & Pullig, C. (2013). I’m number one! Does narcissism impair ethical judgment even for the highly religious?. Journal of Business Ethics, 112(1), 167-176.

Hermann, A. D., & Fuller, R. C. (2018). Grandiose narcissism and religiosity. Handbook of trait narcissism, 379-387.

Hermann, A., & Fuller, R. (2017). Trait narcissism and contemporary religious trends. Archive for the Psychology of Religion, 39(2), 99-117.

Vail III, K. E., Soenke, M., & Waggoner, B. (2019). Terror management theory and religious belief. In Handbook of terror management theory (pp. 259-285). Academic Press.

Wink, P., Dillon, M., & Fay, K. (2005). Spiritual seeking, narcissism, and psychotherapy: How are they related?. Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 44(2), 143-158.

---