In what are surely the least surprising findings of the year, surgeons have been revealed as the most narcissistic speciality, while GPs have come up smelling like roses. The investigation into “dark” personality traits among staff at a UK teaching hospital measured the prevalence of narcissism, psychopathy and Machiavellianism within each speciality. From a […]
In what are surely the least surprising findings of the year, surgeons have been revealed as the most narcissistic speciality, while GPs have come up smelling like roses.
The investigation into “dark” personality traits among staff at a UK teaching hospital measured the prevalence of narcissism, psychopathy and Machiavellianism within each speciality.
From a pool of 250 health professionals, surgeons easily scored the highest in narcissism, prompting the authors to suggest the removal of mirrored surfaces from theatres.
GPs, on the other hand, scored among the lowest across all three “dark” personality traits. These results did not reach statistical significance, but that is entirely beside the point.
The authors – who included two orthopaedic surgery registrars – attempted to justify their speciality’s high levels of narcissism by arguing that the need to rapidly save patients’ lives required “cool confidence”.
But the authors’ true nature shone through when they attempted to explain why anaesthetists – who also work in life or death situations – exhibited much lower narcissism scores.
“Most the anaesthesiologists who participated in this study were working in orthopaedic theatres alongside surgeons who are more intellectually advanced, physically superior and statistically better looking,” they wrote.
“It is therefore likely that this has negatively impacted their self esteem.”
When compared to a sample from the general population, the hospital staff on the whole scored lower in all three “dark” personality traits.
“Reassuringly, psychopaths have been steered away from the doors of medical and nursing schools into presumably more suitable careers, such as politics,” the authors wrote.
The authors acknowledged their findings might have been influenced by the “stiff upper lip” of the UK staff, or that their sample of the general population might not have been emotionally stable, as it was recruited through social media.
But the obvious flaw of this study is that its important findings relating to GPs were not published in The Lancet.
