For years, Donald Trump’s distinctive, large, bold signature captured the public’s attention. It was recently revealed that his signature appeared on a book that Jeffrey Epstein received for his 50th birthday, and it also fits perfectly with his long history of shameless self-praise. “I love my signature, I really do,” he said in a speech to military leaders on September 30, 2025. “Everyone loves my signature.”
His signature is also of particular interest to me, given my decades-long fascination with the relationship between signature size and personal attributes, as well as my occasional academic research on the subject.
As a social psychologist with a long history of studying the American elite, I made a serendipitous empirical discovery during my undergraduate studies more than 50 years ago. The link I found then—and that numerous subsequent studies corroborated—is that firm size is related to status and self-esteem.
Firm size and self-esteem
In 1967, during my senior year of college, I was working in the psychology library at Wesleyan University. My task, four nights a week, was to lend books and return those that had been collected.
When students or teachers checked out books, they were asked to sign on an unlined orange card found inside each book.
At one point, I noticed a pattern: When teachers checked out books, they used a lot of space to sign. When students pulled them out, they used very little space, leaving plenty of room for future readers.
So I decided to study this observation systematically.
I collected at least 10 signatures from each teacher and comparative samples of signatures from students with names of the same length. After measuring the space used by multiplying the height by the width, I discovered that eight of the nine teachers used considerably more space for signing.
To evaluate the influence of age and status, I conducted another study comparing the signatures of manual workers, such as janitors and gardeners, who worked at the school, with a sample of teachers and a sample of students, again with the same number of letters, this time on blank 3″ x 5″ cards. Manual workers used more space than students, but less than teachers. I concluded that age played a role, but so did status.
When I reported my findings to psychologist Karl Scheibe, my favorite professor, he told me that he could measure the signatures on his books, which he had been signing for more than a decade, since his first year of college.
The size of their signatures on the books increased considerably. They experienced a significant increase between their third and fourth years of college, decreased slightly upon entering graduate school, and then increased again upon completing their doctorate and joining the Wesleyan faculty.
I conducted some more studies and published some papers, concluding that signature size was related to self-esteem and was a measure of what I called “status consciousness.” I found that this pattern held in a variety of settings, including Iran, where people write from right to left.
You might be interested in: Narcissism; the lessons learned about this personality disorder in the last 30 years
The connection with narcissism
Although my subsequent research included a book on the CEOs of Fortune 500 companies, it never occurred to me to analyze their signatures.
However, it did occur to some researchers, 40 years later. In May 2013, I received a call from the editor of the Harvard Business Review because of the work I had done on firm size. They planned to publish an interview with Nick Seybert, an associate professor of accounting at the University of Maryland, about the possible relationship between firm size and narcissism in CEOs.
Although Seybert told me that his research had found no direct evidence of a positive relationship between the two, the possibility of the connection he inferred intrigued me.
So I decided to put it to the test with a sample of my students. I asked them to sign a blank 3-by-5-inch card as if they were writing a check, and then I provided them with a widely used 16-item narcissism scale.
And, indeed, Seybert was right to deduce a relationship: there was a significant positive correlation between firm size and narcissism. Although my sample was small, this relationship led Seybert to analyze two different samples of his students, and he found the same positive and significant correlation.
Soon, others began using firm size to assess narcissism in CEOs. By 2020, growing interest in the topic led to the publication in the Journal of Management of an article that included firm size as one of five ways to measure narcissism in CEOs.
An expanding field
Now, almost six years later, researchers use firm size to explore narcissism in CEOs and other senior corporate officials, such as chief financial officers. This relationship was found not only in the United States, but also in countries such as the United Kingdom, Germany, Uruguay, Iran, South Africa, and China.
Additionally, some researchers studied the effect of large versus small firms on those who observe them. For example, in a recent Journal of Philanthropy article, Canadian researchers reported on three studies that systematically varied the signature size of fund seekers to see whether this affected the size of donations. And so it was. In one of their studies, they found that increasing the size of the sender’s signature generated more than double the revenue.
The surprising resurgence of research using signature size to assess narcissism leads me to some conclusions.
First, signature size as a measure of certain aspects of personality turned out to be much stronger than I imagined when, in 1967, I was an observant college student working in a university library.
In fact, the size of the firm is not only an indicator of status and self-esteem, as I once concluded. It is also, as recent studies suggest, an indicator of narcissistic tendencies, the kind that many argue Trump’s big, flashy signature exhibits.
No one knows where this research will lead the future, least of all the person who all those years ago noticed something intriguing about the size of the firm.
*Richie Zweigenhaft is Professor Emeritus of Psychology at Guilford College.
This text was originally published in The Conversation
Do you use Facebook more? Leave us a like to be informed
