For years, Donald Trump’s distinctive, massive, and daring signature has captured the general public’s consideration. Not solely did it lately come to mild that his signature appeared in a ebook that Jeffrey Epstein obtained for his fiftieth birthday, nevertheless it suits neatly alongside Trump’s lengthy historical past of brash self-adulation. “I like my signature, I actually do,” he mentioned in a September 30, 2025, speech to navy leaders. “Everybody loves my signature.”
His signature additionally occurs to be of explicit curiosity to me, given my decades-long fascination with, and occasional educational analysis on, the connection between signature measurement and private attributes.
A protracted-time social psychologist who has studied America’s elite, I made an unintentional empirical discovery as an undergraduate greater than 50 years in the past. The hyperlink that I discovered then—and that quite a few research have since echoed—is that signature measurement is said to standing and one’s sense of self.
Signature measurement and shallowness
Again in 1967, throughout my senior 12 months of faculty, I used to be a work-study pupil in Wesleyan College’s psychology library. My activity, 4 nights per week, was to take a look at books and to reshelve books that had been returned.
When college students or college took books out, they had been requested to signal their names on an orange, unlined card present in every ebook.
Sooner or later, I seen a sample: When college signed the books out, they used a variety of house to signal their names. When college students checked them out, they used little or no house, leaving a variety of house for future readers.
So I made a decision to review my commentary systematically.
I gathered a minimum of 10 signatures for every college member and comparability samples of pupil signatures with the identical variety of letters of their names. After measuring by multiplying the peak versus the width of the quantity of house used, I discovered that eight of the 9 college members used considerably extra space to signal their names.
With the intention to check for age in addition to standing, I did one other examine through which I in contrast the signatures of blue-collar employees akin to custodians and groundskeepers who labored on the college with a pattern of professors and a pattern of scholars—once more matched for the variety of letters, this time on clean 3-by-5-inch playing cards. The blue-collar employees used extra space than the scholars however lower than the college. I concluded that age was at play, however so was standing.
After I informed psychologist Karl Scheibe, my favourite trainer, about my findings, he mentioned I may measure the signatures in his books, which he had been signing for greater than a decade since his freshman 12 months in faculty.
As could be seen within the graph, his ebook signatures largely acquired greater. They took a significant leap in measurement from his junior 12 months to his senior 12 months, dipped a bit when he entered graduate college, after which elevated in measurement as he accomplished his PhD and joined the Wesleyan college.
I did a number of extra research, and revealed a number of articles, concluding that signature measurement was associated to shallowness and a measure of what I termed “standing consciousness.” I discovered that the sample held in various totally different environments, together with in Iran—the place individuals write from proper to left.
The narcissism connection
Though my subsequent analysis included a ebook in regards to the CEOs of Fortune 500 corporations, it by no means crossed my thoughts to take a look at the signatures of those CEOs.
Nevertheless, it did cross the minds of some researchers 40 years later. In Could 2013, I obtained a name from the editor of the Harvard Enterprise Evaluation due to the work I had accomplished on signature measurement. The publication deliberate to run an interview with Nick Seybert, an affiliate professor of accounting on the College of Maryland, in regards to the potential hyperlink between signature measurement and narcissism in CEOs.
Whereas Seybert informed me his analysis had not discovered direct proof for a constructive relationship between the 2, the potential for the connection he inferred nonetheless intrigued me.
So I made a decision to check this utilizing a pattern of my college students. I requested them to signal a clean 3-by-5 card as in the event that they had been writing a test, after which I gave them a extensively used 16-item narcissism scale.
Lo and behold, Seybert was proper to infer a hyperlink: There was a major constructive correlation between signature measurement and narcissism. Though my pattern measurement was small, the hyperlink subsequently led Seybert to check two totally different samples of his college students. And he discovered the identical important, constructive correlation.
Others quickly started to make use of signature measurement to evaluate narcissism in CEOs. By 2020, rising curiosity within the matter noticed the Journal of Administration publish an article that included signature measurement as one in every of 5 methods to measure narcissism in CEOs.
A rising area
Now, nearly six years later, researchers have used signature measurement to discover narcissism in CEOs and different senior company positions akin to chief monetary officers. The hyperlink has been discovered not solely within the U.S. however in nations together with the UK, Germany, Uruguay, Iran, South Africa, and China.
As well as, some researchers have studied the impact of bigger versus smaller signatures on the viewers. For instance, in a current article within the Journal of Philanthropy, Canadian researchers reported on three research that systematically different the signature measurement of somebody soliciting funds with the intention to see whether or not it affected the dimensions of donations. It did. In one in every of their research, they discovered that rising the dimensions of the sender’s signature generated greater than twice as a lot income.
The shocking resurgence of analysis utilizing signature measurement to evaluate narcissism leads me to some conclusions.
For one, signature measurement as a measure of sure points of character has turned out to be rather more strong than I imagined as an observant undergraduate working in a school library again in 1967.
Certainly, signature measurement isn’t solely an indicator of standing and shallowness, as I as soon as concluded. It’s also, as current research counsel, an indicator of narcissistic tendencies—the sort that many argue are exhibited by Trump’s large, daring signature.
The place this analysis is taken subsequent is anybody’s guess, least of all for the one that seen one thing intriguing about signature measurement so a few years in the past.
Richie Zweigenhaft is an emeritus professor of psychology at Guilford School.
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