If you want to know how to deal with egomaniacs, you’re in the right place.
You know the type. Every story circles back to them. Your idea becomes their idea by Thursday, and if you disagree, even politely, the temperature in the room drops ten degrees.
It’s exhausting. It’s also common, which means you’ll probably meet several of them: a colleague, a boss, a friend who is brilliant company for the first hour, maybe someone you share a home with.
A quick word on labels. “Egomaniac” isn’t a clinical term. Ohio State University psychologist Brad Bushman has pointed out that nearly everyone carries some degree of narcissism, and only a minority reach levels high enough to count as pathological. This article is about the everyday version, the self-centered behavior you can actually work with. If what you’re facing has crossed into control or fear, go straight to number 12.
The ideas below lean on the newest research I could find, most of it from 2025 and 2026. Where the science is thin, I’ll say so.
1. Work out which kind of ego you’re dealing with
Not every egomaniac runs on the same fuel.
Psychologists split narcissism into two broad forms. Grandiose narcissism is the loud, dominant, attention-hungry version. Vulnerable narcissism is touchier and more insecure, and it bruises easily. Both share a core of entitlement, yet they behave very differently under pressure.
A meta-analysis by Ria Tziliaskopoulos, Megan Willis and colleagues at Australian Catholic University, published in Personality and Individual Differences in 2026, pooled 26 studies covering 12,209 adults. Vulnerable narcissism showed a moderate link with difficulty managing emotions (a correlation of 0.37), while for grandiose narcissism the figure was 0.04, which is close to nothing. Speaking to PsyPost in October 2026, Willis explained that people high in vulnerable narcissism tend to be hypersensitive to rejection and criticism, and may struggle to handle the feelings that follow, which can spill out as hostility. Every study in the pool was cross-sectional and self-reported, so this is a link, not proof of cause.
Why should you care? Because the show-off and the brittle type need different handling. One wants an audience. The other wants reassurance and can blow up without it.
Start small: the next three times this person gets under your skin, note whether they seemed to be performing or protecting themselves. A pattern shows up quickly. If you’d like to sharpen that kind of reading in general, these strategies for improving your emotional intelligence help.
2. Never correct them in front of an audience
The mechanism runs like this. An inflated self-image needs constant defending. Public criticism is a direct hit to that image. A threatened image triggers a defense, and with narcissism the defense often comes out as aggression: a cutting remark, a counterattack, a sulk that lasts all week.
Each link in that chain has support. Sophie Kjærvik and Brad Bushman of Ohio State University reviewed 437 studies with 123,043 participants for Psychological Bulletin in 2021. Narcissism was tied to aggression across ages, genders and countries, and the link was much stronger after provocation (r = 0.29) than without it (r = 0.12). As Bushman put it, “those who are high in narcissism have thin skins.” That review is five years old. I found no newer meta-analysis on the question, which is why it still carries this point. Most of the data are correlational, though experimental and longitudinal studies in the pool showed the same direction.
So provocation is the lever you control. Take away the audience and you lower the threat. They still won’t enjoy the message, but a blow-up becomes less likely.
Next time, do this: move the point into a one-on-one, describe the behavior rather than the person (“the deadline moved twice this month”), and stop after two sentences. The guide to being more careful about what you say has more phrasing that keeps the heat down.
3. Ask them to see it from your side
You might assume empathy is simply missing in egomaniacs. The research is more hopeful than that.
In three studies published in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin in 2014, Erica Hepper and colleagues found that people high in the maladaptive parts of narcissism (entitlement, exploitativeness, exhibitionism) reported less empathy for a distressed woman in a video. When they were instructed to imagine her perspective, that gap closed. It even showed up in their heart rate. Their conclusion was that low empathy looked more like a lack of motivation than a lack of ability. A 2023 study of 140 people by Emanuel Jauk’s team, reported by TU Dresden in January 2024, found a related pattern: perspective-taking was weaker in daily life but not impaired in the lab. Both studies are older than I’d like and the samples were modest, so treat this as promising rather than settled.
The practical takeaway is simple. Don’t wait for them to wonder how you feel. Invite them to.
With a friend who monopolizes every dinner, you could say: “Picture the last three evenings from my chair. How much did I get to talk?” That’s an explicit prompt, close to what changed responses in the lab, and it lands better if you’ve been modeling empathy toward them yourself.
4. Take the toll on you seriously
A self-centered colleague isn’t a small annoyance you should just shrug off. These encounters wear people down, and the numbers show it.
In SHRM’s Q2 2025 Civility Index, which surveyed 1,540 U.S. workers in April 2025, 53% of those who had experienced or witnessed incivility at work said it hurt their mental health. Nearly six in ten of them (58%) said it affected them more than their other workplace stressors. Incivility and egomania aren’t identical, but they overlap a lot: talking over people, belittling, grabbing credit. SHRM’s newest edition, Q2 2026 (the index went twice-yearly this year), shows workplace incivility still in its “moderate” zone, and the everyday-life score passed 50 for the first time since tracking began. The detailed mental-health questions come from the 2025 edition, which is why I quote it here.
Your move: for one week, rate how you feel after each encounter on a 1 to 10 scale. A vague drain becomes visible once it has numbers, and those numbers will help you decide how much effort this relationship deserves.
5. Stop fighting for an admission
Plenty of arguments with an egomaniac stall for one reason. You’re asking for the thing they find hardest to give: “I was wrong.”
A paper in the Journal of Personality by Esther Robins and colleagues at the University of Southampton, reported in February 2026, offers a possible explanation. Using EEG, the team measured error-related negativity, the brain’s split-second “oops” signal, while students did a fast reaction task. Higher grandiose narcissism went with a weaker signal, first in 144 students and then in a follow-up of 50 where mistakes were flagged on screen. The authors themselves call this early evidence. The samples were modest, mostly young, white and British.
It does match what many people see day to day. If someone’s brain registers mistakes less sharply, demanding a confession may be a losing game.
Say you’re in a meeting and a colleague insists the client asked for the blue version, though the email clearly says green. (This is a hypothetical example.) You could spend twenty minutes on who remembered what. Or you could forward the email to the group and move straight to the fix.
A quick experiment: in your next disagreement, swap “admit it” for “so what do we do now?” Aim for the decision, not the apology. If the denials start to feel like rewriting history, it’s worth reading up on how to respond to gaslighting.
6. If the egomaniac is your boss, judge results, not charisma
A boss who radiates certainty can look like a great leader. That impression can mislead you.
Daniela Pauknerová, head of the Department of Managerial Psychology and Sociology at the Prague University of Economics and Business, made the point in February 2026: charisma and self-confidence don’t automatically make someone good for a company over the long run. She described narcissistic traits as double-edged. They can help in a crisis that needs fast, decisive action, and they can tip into excessive risk and ignored feedback. Her view grows out of a meta-analysis she co-wrote with Pavlína Honsová and Aleš Kubíček in the Journal of Managerial Psychology. The trio compared 124 studies from the past twenty years and couldn’t establish whether narcissistic leaders help or hurt company performance, partly because so many studies measured narcissism with shaky methods.
That cuts two ways for you. Don’t assume your boss is a disaster. Don’t take their self-assessment at face value either.
Test it this week: before your next one-on-one, write down three concrete outcomes you need from your manager and bring evidence for each. Keep the meeting on deliverables, not on whose idea was best. If your problem is less ego and more hovering, see the guide on dealing with a micromanager.
7. Keep a record, and don’t count on the crowd
When ego turns into bullying, your memory alone won’t be enough.
The Workplace Bullying Institute’s 2024 U.S. Workplace Bullying Survey, its sixth national study and the latest edition, conducted by Zogby Analytics, found that 32.3% of adult Americans had been directly bullied at work. Bosses were the perpetrators in 55% of cases. Two other figures are sobering. Coworkers stepped in to support targets just 2% of the time. And targets ended up losing their jobs in 62% of cases, while only 27% of perpetrators faced negative consequences. The survey is from autumn 2024, right at the edge of two years old, and WBI campaigns for anti-bullying laws as well as doing research. Read these numbers as a strong signal rather than the final word.
The lesson is uncomfortable but useful. If things escalate, you’ll need your own evidence, and you can’t assume anyone else will speak up.
Here’s a simple way in: keep a private, dated log of incidents (what was said, who was there, what it affected) on a device that isn’t your employer’s. Stick to facts, not interpretations. That record helps whether you end up talking to HR, a union rep or a lawyer, and there’s more on holding firm in working with a controlling person.
8. Starve the status, feed the belonging
The usual advice is “don’t feed their ego.” Fine. But what do you offer instead?
A 2026 study in the Journal of Personality by Christian Jordan of Wilfrid Laurier University and Nikhila Mahadevan tracked 528 Canadian undergraduates through three surveys, each two weeks apart. Grandiose narcissism and status fed each other. More narcissism predicted a stronger hunger for status, and feeling high-status predicted more narcissism two weeks later. The surprising part: when participants felt genuinely included and liked, their grandiose narcissism tended to fall over the following fortnight. The authors call their findings preliminary. Results varied across the measures they used, and the sample was students only.
So praise isn’t the answer, because praise is status. Belonging seems to work differently.
Skip the “you’re a genius” lines. Treat them as one of the group instead: ask for their input alongside everyone else’s, thank them for one specific contribution, give credit that’s shared. Ordinary warmth, the kind described in this guide to being friendly and kind, lowers the status payoff without freezing them out.
9. Go boring when the self-praise starts
If attention is the reward, the logic is straightforward. The Jordan and Mahadevan study above points to status and admiration as central motives in grandiose narcissism. Every gasp of admiration or flash of irritation delivers some of that reward. Shrink the reward and the behavior has less reason to keep going.
Think of it like a campfire. Your reactions are the oxygen, and without them the monologue tends to burn down faster. The comparison has limits, of course. People aren’t fires, and some of them flare up before they settle, especially the vulnerable type from point 1. I also couldn’t find a controlled study of the so-called “grey rock” approach, so this is a reasoned mechanism, not a tested treatment.
One adjustment to the classic advice: aim for neutral, not bored. Visible boredom can read as a put-down, and you already know how that goes.
Give it a go: the next time the self-praise starts, answer with a short “Mm, okay,” then change the subject. Keep your face relaxed and your gaze soft, and this guide to eye contact without staring shows how to stay polite while giving less.
10. If you manage an egomaniac, move early
When the self-centered person reports to you, your response shapes the whole team.
Gallup’s State of the Global Workplace 2026 report, based on its 2025 World Poll data, found that global employee engagement fell to 20%, the lowest since 2020. Manager engagement dropped to 22%, nine points down since 2022. Gallup has also long estimated that managers account for about 70% of the variance in team engagement. Gallup doesn’t measure egomania, so don’t read these numbers as being about narcissists. What they show is how much the manager matters. SHRM’s 2025 data point the same way: workers who got little support from their manager after an uncivil incident were nearly 48% more likely to be looking for another job.
Letting one ego run the room has a cost, and everyone else pays it.
Start small: give the egotistical employee choices within clear limits (“you can lead the pitch or own the analysis”) so they get autonomy without control. Then deal with any put-down of a colleague the same day, privately and specifically. For the wider picture, see what makes a good boss.
11. In a relationship, worry about the put-downs more than the bragging
Living with someone who loves the sound of their own voice is tiring. A long-term study suggests the bragging isn’t the main threat, though.
Gwendolyn Seidman of Michigan State University and her colleagues followed more than 5,000 couples for up to six years and published the results in the Journal of Personality in 2026. They separated two strategies narcissists use to prop themselves up: admiration, which means trying to impress, and rivalry, which means putting others down. Rivalry was consistently tied to lower relationship satisfaction for both partners. Admiration had no meaningful effect on either. Satisfaction also didn’t fall any faster in couples with a highly narcissistic partner, and in couples together a year or less, narcissistic traits showed no link with satisfaction at all. The data are observational, so they show associations rather than causes.
Pay attention to the type of behavior, then. Showing off at parties is grating. Regular belittling is what wears a relationship down.
A practical script: “When you call my idea stupid in front of people, I shut down. Disagree with me if you like, but without the insult. If it happens again, I’ll leave the conversation.” Then do exactly that. If the put-downs are a pattern, couples counseling is worth suggesting.
12. Know when ego has turned into abuse
Self-centeredness is one thing. Control, intimidation and fear are something else.
The World Health Organization’s fact sheet on violence against women, updated in June 2026, defines intimate partner violence as including psychological abuse and controlling behavior, not only physical harm. WHO’s latest estimates, published in November 2025 and covering data up to 2023, found that nearly one in three women worldwide (32%) has been subjected to physical or sexual violence by a partner, sexual violence by someone else, or both. Those figures are about women and aren’t specific to narcissism. Abuse can happen to anyone, by anyone, whatever their personality.
Being an egomaniac isn’t proof of abuse, and abuse doesn’t need a diagnosis to be real. If someone monitors your phone, cuts you off from friends, controls the money or makes you afraid, that’s the line, wherever you think their ego fits in.
If any of that sounds familiar, talk to someone outside the relationship today. Local domestic abuse services and helplines can help you plan safely, and in an emergency, call your local emergency number.
13. Draw boundaries, and say them out loud
Boundaries are the most repeated advice on this topic. Do people actually use them?
They do. In SHRM’s Q2 2025 survey, among workers whose mental health had suffered from workplace incivility, the most common step they took was setting work/life boundaries (55%), followed by talking with people outside work (51%). That tells you what people find worth trying. It doesn’t prove boundaries solve the problem, because the survey didn’t track outcomes.
A boundary works best as a plain if-then. “If you talk over me, I’ll stop and wait.” “I don’t answer messages after 8 p.m.” State it once, calmly, and then act on it every single time. Consistency is what teaches.
Next time, do this: pick one boundary, the one that would bring the most relief, and hold it for two weeks before adding another.
14. Set realistic expectations about change
With a parent or sibling, the hope that “one day they’ll finally get it” can keep you stuck for years.
Ulrich Orth of the University of Bern offered a useful reality check in July 2024, when he told the American Psychological Association that narcissism behaves like a stable personality trait, even across very long periods. He also mentioned one theory for why it softens with age: adult roles such as partner, parent and employee tend to mature people. His comments came with a meta-analysis he led with Samantha Krauss and Mitja Back in Psychological Bulletin, pooling 51 samples and 37,247 people aged 8 to 77. On average, narcissism declined from childhood to old age. Yet people’s position relative to their peers stayed largely the same, so the self-absorbed teenager tends to become a slightly less self-absorbed, still above-average adult. The work is a little over two years old now, but it remains the most complete longitudinal review I found, and the data come mostly from North America and Western Europe.
Some change is normal, then. A personality transplant isn’t.
Oddly, that’s freeing. Stop investing in the big conversion and put your energy into what you control: shorter visits, topics you genuinely enjoy together, a clear exit plan for when things turn sour. Family counseling can still help everyone else in the household, even if the egomaniac refuses to go.
15. Notice when the charm has worn off
Egomaniacs are often the most fun person in the room at first. That’s partly why friendships with them last longer than they should.
A 2026 study in the Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, led by Christopher Barry of Washington State University, followed 252 teenagers aged 15 to 18 through a 22-week residential program. About seven weeks in, grandiose narcissism went with being seen as popular. By the end of the program that link had gone, and it never translated into being liked. Teens whom peers flagged as boastful early on lost popularity later. The setting was unusual, a quasi-military program for at-risk youth, so the pattern may look different in an ordinary friend group.
It’s still a useful mirror. Are you staying because the friendship feels good now, or because of how it felt at the start?
A quick experiment: after your next three meetups, ask yourself one question. Did I get a turn? If the answer keeps coming back no, it’s fine to see them less, or not at all, and spending more evenings by yourself is no punishment when you know how to enjoy being alone.
What to do when you slip
You will slip. You’ll take the bait, argue for forty minutes, or apologize for something that wasn’t your fault.
The worst thing to do afterward is replay it on a loop. A 2025 systematic review in Stress and Health by Jun Wang, Maya Schroevers and colleagues at the University of Groningen and the University of Twente looked at 113 studies on why self-compassion helps mental health. The most consistent pathway was less repetitive negative thinking, such as rumination and worry. Most of those studies were cross-sectional, so the direction of cause isn’t settled, but the pattern held across very different groups of people.
So when it happens:
- Name it, briefly. “I got pulled into the argument again.”
- Talk to yourself the way you’d talk to a friend who did the same thing. Harsh self-talk feeds the loop, and if it has become a habit, this piece on how to stop hating yourself is worth your time.
- Choose one thing you’ll do differently next time. Just one.
- Get the rest of the day back on track; turning a bad day around has a few quick resets.
One slip doesn’t wipe out your progress. It’s a data point.
Conclusion
Egomaniacs aren’t going anywhere. What you can change is how much of your energy they get.
Figure out which kind you’re dealing with. Keep criticism private, skip the fight for a confession, and offer belonging instead of applause. Protect yourself with records, boundaries and people outside the situation. And when ego tips into control or fear, treat it as the serious thing it is.
Choose one idea from this list and try it this week. Then come back for more on handling difficult people and keeping the relationships that matter in our Relationships section.
