Most People Are Narcissists… Count the Squares

At first look, the picture seems straightforward: a bright set of square blocks arranged in a tidy stack.
The headline says, “Most People Are Narcissists… Count the Squares.” It comes across like a fun little challenge. Count the squares you can spot and compare your total. But underneath that quick game, the image points to something bigger about how we notice things, how closely we pay attention, and how our ego can slip into the driver’s seat.

So what number do you get?

Some people respond right away. They only count the most visible squares on the top. Others slow down and add the squares facing forward. A smaller group studies the sides and starts catching overlaps they missed at first. The totals change depending on how carefully someone looks.

And that’s where the real point starts to show.

The Psychology Behind What We Notice

Human attention is selective. Our brains are built to take shortcuts so we can process scenes fast. That often means we lock onto what’s easiest to see, the parts right in front of us, and we assume that’s the full picture.

That habit connects to something psychologists call cognitive bias. We lean on first impressions. We trust our first answer. And when another person gives a different number, we can brush it off instead of checking again.

That’s where the link to narcissism gets brought into the conversation.

The “I’m Right” Reflex

People throw around the word “narcissist” a lot now. Clinically, narcissism involves an exaggerated sense of importance, a strong hunger for praise, and trouble empathizing with others. But in regular life, smaller narcissistic habits can show up in quiet, everyday ways.

For example, someone counts the squares, confidently says, “It’s 8,” and feels sure they nailed it. If someone else replies, “I think it’s 12,” the first reaction might not be interest. It might be resistance.

“I checked carefully.”
“You’re wrong.”
“I know what I saw.”

Quiz Game in C – GeeksforGeeks

At that point, the puzzle stops being about counting and starts becoming about defending pride.

Layers Past the Obvious

If you look again at the blocks, you may realize the design creates overlapping viewpoints. Some squares are visible from above. Others are visible from the front. Depending on how you track the shapes, you can end up with different totals.

Real life works like that too.

We view situations from our own angle and assume that angle is complete. We count what stands out to us. But someone looking from another position may notice details we missed, or interpret the same scene differently.

The real takeaway isn’t the final number. It’s whether you’re open to revisiting your first answer.

Are Most People Narcissists?

That headline is meant to provoke. Not everyone is a narcissist in the clinical sense. Still, many of us have moments where we treat our viewpoint as the only one that matters. We jump to conclusions. We cling to our opinion. We don’t like being corrected.

The colorful blocks aren’t just shapes. They stand for complexity. The “right” count depends on how you observe what’s there.

So the real question is not only, “How many squares do you see?”

It’s this:

Are you willing to look again?

Because growth starts when we slow down, pay closer attention, and accept that our first glance might not have caught everything.

Sometimes the real test is not how smart you are.

It’s whether you can stay humble.

And that might be the most important square of all.