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SeedPublished 2026-10-23

CEO personality at scale

Narcissism, CEO characteristics and CEO personality appear on 42 recent papers, mostly in the management and accounting journals, with measures built from signatures, photos and pronoun counts. Language models can now score personality from thousands of hours of speech. Do the old measures and the new ones agree, and does personality predict decisions out of sample?

managementaccountingai

What prompted this

Since October 2025, 42 papers carry a narcissism, CEO-personality, CEO-trait, hubris or CEO-characteristics keyword (19 in management journals, 10 in accounting): "narcissism" on 14, "CEO characteristics" on 12, "CEO narcissism" on 7, "CEO personality" on 3. Eleven were published in July–September 2026, in line with earlier quarters.

Questions

  • Do narcissism scores from signatures, photo size and pronoun use agree with scores that language models assign from interviews and earnings calls, and which predicts acquisitions, risk taking and fraud better?
  • Do the published effects of CEO narcissism replicate in new samples with the new measures?
  • Do boards hire different personalities after a scandal, and can that be seen in the data?

Data that could help

Earnings call transcripts and interviews, proxy statements with signatures and photos, deal and accounting data (SDC, Compustat, Audit Analytics).

Next step

Score the same 500 CEOs with the signature-based measure and a language-model measure from their earnings calls, and compare the two against acquisition behaviour.

Related research activity

The keywords this note follows, in the tracked finance, accounting, economics, management, operations research and AI journals as of 2026-10-26
KeywordPapers, last 30 daysRankPapers per month, Oct 23 – Oct 26*Papers, last 36 months
CEO narcissism0–22
narcissism0–35
CEO characteristics0–44

Markdown version of this note: /ideas/narcissistic-ceos-from-text.md

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Cite this page

Scholar4AI. (2026). CEO personality at scale. Journal Research Rankings. Retrieved October 23, 2026, from https://scholar4ai.com/ideas/narcissistic-ceos-from-text

@misc{scholar4ai-ideas-narcissistic-ceos-from-text,
  author = {{Scholar4AI}},
  title = {CEO personality at scale},
  year = {2026},
  howpublished = {\url{https://scholar4ai.com/ideas/narcissistic-ceos-from-text}},
  urldate = {2026-10-23},
  note = {Journal Research Rankings; data from OpenAlex (CC0); licensed CC BY-NC 4.0}
}

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