For years, Donald Trump’s distinctive, massive, and daring signature has captured the general public’s consideration. Not only did it recently come to light that his signature appeared in a book that Jeffrey Epstein obtained for his fiftieth birthday, nevertheless it matches neatly alongside Trump’s lengthy historical past of brash self-adulation. “I really like my signature, I actually do,” he said in a September 30, 2025, speech to military leaders. “Everybody loves my signature.”
His signature additionally occurs to be of specific 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 expounded to standing and one’s sense of self.
Signature measurement and shallowness
Again in 1967, throughout my senior yr of school, I used to be a work-study scholar in Wesleyan College’s psychology library. My process, 4 nights per week, was to take a look at books and to reshelve books that had been returned.
When college students or school took books out, they had been requested to signal their names on an orange, unlined card present in every e book.
Sooner or later, I seen a sample: When school signed the books out, they used a variety of area to signal their names. When college students checked them out, they used little or no area, leaving a variety of area for future readers.
So I made a decision to review my remark systematically.
I gathered at the very least 10 signatures for every school member and comparability samples of scholar signatures with the identical variety of letters of their names. After measuring by multiplying the peak versus the width of the quantity of area used, I discovered that eight of the 9 school members used significantly more space to signal their names.
With the intention to take a look at for age in addition to standing, I did one other examine by which I in contrast the signatures of blue-collar employees resembling 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 more room than the scholars however lower than the college. I concluded that age was at play, however so was standing.
Once I advised 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 yr in faculty.
As might be seen within the graph, his e book signatures largely obtained larger. They took a serious leap in measurement from his junior yr to his senior yr, dipped a bit when he entered graduate college, after which elevated in measurement as he accomplished his PhD and joined the Wesleyan school.
I did a few more studies, and printed a couple of articles, concluding that signature measurement was associated to shallowness and a measure of what I termed “status awareness.” I discovered that the sample held in numerous totally different environments, including in Iran—the place individuals write from proper to left.
The narcissism connection
Though my subsequent analysis included a book about the CEOs of Fortune 500 companies, 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 Might 2013, I obtained a name from the editor of the Harvard Enterprise Overview due to the work I had performed 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 size and narcissism in CEOs.
Whereas Seybert advised me his analysis had not discovered direct proof for a constructive relationship between the 2, the potential of 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 examine, after which I gave them a widely used 16-item narcissism scale.
Lo and behold, Seybert was proper to infer a hyperlink: There was a big 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 found the same significant, positive correlation.
Others quickly started to use signature size to assess narcissism in CEOs. By 2020, rising curiosity within the subject noticed the Journal of Management publish an article that included signature measurement as one in all 5 methods to measure narcissism in CEOs.
A rising discipline
Now, virtually six years later, researchers have used signature measurement to explore narcissism in CEOs and other senior corporate positions such as chief financial officers. The hyperlink has been discovered not solely within the U.S. however in international locations together with the United Kingdom, 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 diversified the signature measurement of somebody soliciting funds as a way to see whether or not it affected the scale of donations. It did. In one in all their research, they discovered that rising the scale of the sender’s signature generated more than twice as much revenue.
The shocking resurgence of analysis utilizing signature measurement to evaluate narcissism leads me to a couple conclusions.
For one, signature measurement as a measure of sure elements of character has turned out to be way more strong than I imagined as an observant undergraduate working in a school library again in 1967.
Certainly, signature measurement just isn’t solely an indicator of standing and shallowness, as I as soon as concluded. Additionally it is, as current research counsel, an indicator of narcissistic tendencies—the sort that many argue are exhibited by Trump’s huge, 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 College.
This text is republished from The Conversation underneath a Artistic Commons license. Learn the original article.
