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for years, donald trumpThe distinctive, big and bold signature has attracted the public’s attention. Recently not only it came to light that his signature has been printed in a book Jeffrey Epstein Received for his 50th birthday, but it fits in with Trump’s long history of brash self-praise. “I love my signature, I really do,” he said in a speech to military leaders on September 30, 2025. “Everyone likes my signature.”
His signature is also of particular interest to me, given my decades-long interest and periodic academic research into the relationship between signature shape and personal characteristics.
As a longtime social psychologist who has studied America’s elite, I made an unintended empirical discovery as an undergraduate more than 50 years ago.
The link I found at the time – and which has been borne out by many studies since – is that signature size is related to status and a person’s sense of self.
Signature size and self-esteem
In 1967, during my senior year of college, I was a work-study student in the psychology library at Wesleyan University. My job, four nights a week, was to check the books and reorder the books that had been returned.
When students or teachers took out books, they were asked to sign their names on an orange, unlined card found in each book.
At some point, I noticed a pattern: When faculty signed books, they used a lot of space to sign their names. When students checked them out, they used very little space, leaving a lot of room for future readers.
So I decided to study my observations systematically.
I collected at least 10 signatures for each faculty member and comparative samples of signatures of students with the same letters in their names. After measuring the amount of space used by multiplying height versus width, I found that eight of the nine faculty members used significantly more space to sign their names.
To test the situation as well as age, I conducted another study in which I compared the signatures of blue-collar workers like custodians and groundskeepers who worked at a school with a sample of professors and a sample of students – again matched for number of letters, this time on blank 3-by-5-inch cards. Blue-collar workers used more space than students but less than faculty. I concluded that age was at play, but status was also at play.
About the author
Richie Zweigenhaft is Professor Emeritus of Psychology at Guilford College.
This article was first published Conversation And it is republished under a Creative Commons license. read the Original article.
When I told my favorite teacher, psychologist Carl Scheibe, about my findings, he said I could measure the signatures in his books, which he had been signing for more than a decade since his freshman year in college.
As can be seen in the graph, their book signatures grew increasingly larger. He took a big jump in size from his junior year to senior year, declined slightly in size when he entered graduate school, and then increased in size when he completed his PhD. and joined the Wesleyan faculty.
I did some more studies, and published some articles, concluding that signature size was related to self-esteem and what I called “situation awareness.” I found that the pattern holds in many different environments, including iran – Where people write from right to left.
narcissistic relationship
Although my later research included a book about CEOs of Fortune 500 companies, the thought of looking at the signatures of these CEOs never occurred to me.
However, 40 years later, it occurred to some researchers. In May 2013, I got a call from the editor of Harvard Business Review because of the work I did on signature shapes. They planned to run an interview with Nick Seibert, an associate professor of accounting at the University of Maryland, about the possible connection between signature size and narcissism in CEOs.
While Seibert told me that his research had not found direct evidence of a positive relationship between the two, the possibility of the relationship he hypothesized still intrigued me.
So I decided to test it using a sample of my students. I asked them to sign a blank 3-by-5 card as if they were writing a check, and then I gave them the widely used 16-item Narcissism Scale.
Lo and behold, Seibert was right to draw a link: there was a significant positive correlation between signature size and narcissism. Although my sample size was small, the link later inspired Seibert to test two separate samples of his students. And they found the same significant, positive correlation.
Others soon began using signature size to assess narcissism in CEOs. By 2020, growing interest in the topic led the Journal of Management to publish an article that included signature size as one of five ways to measure narcissism in CEOs.
a growing area
Now, nearly six years later, researchers have used signature size to detect narcissism in other senior corporate positions, such as CEOs and chief financial officers. This link has been found not only in the US but in many countries including the United Kingdom, Germany, Uruguay, Iran, South Africa and China.
Additionally, some researchers have studied the impact of large versus small signatures on audiences. For example, in a recent article in the Journal of Philanthropy, Canadian researchers report on three studies that systematically varied the size of a person’s signature soliciting funds to see if this affected the size of donations. Had done this. 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 a few conclusions.
For one, signature size as a measure of certain aspects of personality has turned out to be much stronger than I imagined as an observant undergraduate working in a college library in 1967.
In fact, the size of the signature is not only an indicator of status and self-esteem, as I once concluded. It is also, as recent studies show, an indicator of narcissistic tendencies – the kind that is arguably displayed by Trump’s big, bold signature.
Where this research will lead next is anyone’s guess, least of all the person who noticed something interesting about signature shapes several years ago.