Several studies have already associated having a larger signature with greater self-esteem and narcissism. Subscription also tends to increase with age.
For years, Donald Trump’s quirky, big, and bold signature has captured the public’s attention. Not only did it recently emerge that his signature appeared on a book Jeffrey Epstein received as a 50th birthday present, it also fits perfectly with his long history of shameless self-congratulation. “I seriously love my signature“, he said in a speech to military leaders on September 30, 2025. “Everyone loves my signature.”
More than 50 years ago, even when I was a student, Richie Zweigenhafta longtime social psychologist who studies the American elite, has made an unintended empirical discovery. The connection he found at the time – and which numerous studies have since corroborated – is that signature size is related to status and self-esteem.
Signature size and self-esteem
In 1967, during his senior year of college, Zweigenhaft worked in the psychology library at Wesleyan University. His job, four nights a week, was to register the borrowed books and return them to the shelves.
When students or teachers requested books, they were asked to sign their names on an orange cardwithout lines, that they found inside each book.
At a certain point, he noticed a pattern: when teachers signed books, they used a lot of space to sign. When students requested them, used very little spaceleaving plenty of space for future readers.
Therefore, he decided to study his observation systematically.
He collected at least 10 signatures from each teacher and comparative samples of signatures from students with the same number of letters in their names. After measuring by multiplying the height by the width of the space used, I found that eight of the nine teachers used significantly more space to sign their names.
To test the influence of age, as well as status, he carried out another study in which he compared the signatures of workers, such as janitors and gardeners, who worked at the school, with a sample of teachers and a sample of students – again paired by the number of letters, this time on blank cards measuring 7.6 x 12.7 cm. Workers used more space than students, but less than teachers. I concluded that age was an important factorbut so does the statute.
When he told psychologist Karl Scheibe, his favorite teacher, about his discoveries, Scheibe said he could measure the signatures on his books, which he had already signed more than a decade agosince the first year of college.
As can be seen in the graph, most of their signatures in books became bigger. They made a significant jump in size from the third to the last year of college, decreased slightly when he entered graduate school, and then increased in size when he completed his doctorate and joined the faculty at Wesleyan University.
After some more studies and a few articles, Zweigenhaft concluded that signature size was related to self-esteem and a measure of what I called “status awareness“.The pattern held true in several different environments, including Iran, where people write from right to left.
The link to narcissism
Although his subsequent research included a book on the CEOs of Fortune 500 companies, it never occurred to him to analyze the signatures of those CEOs.
However, this idea crossed the minds of some researchers, 40 years later. In May 2013, Zweigenhaft received a call from the editor of the Harvard Business Review regarding work he had done on subscription size. They planned to publish an interview with Nick Seybert, an associate professor of accounting at the University of Maryland, about the possible link between signature size and narcissism we CEO.
Although Seybert told him that his investigation had not found direct evidence of a positive relationship between the two, the possibility of the connection he inferred nevertheless intrigued Zweigenhaft. So, he decided to test this using a sample of his students. He asked them to sign a blank 7.5 x 12.5 cm card as if they were writing a check and then handed them a widely used 16-item narcissism scale.
And to his surprise, Seybert was right to deduce a link: there was a significant positive correlation between signature size and narcissism. Although my sample was small, this connection led Seybert to test two different samples of his students. And found the same positive and significant correlation.
Others soon began using signature size to assess narcissism in CEOs. In 2020, growing interest in the topic led the Journal of Management to publish a report that included signature size as one of five ways to measure narcissism in CEOs.
An expanding field
Now, nearly six years later, investigators have used signature size to explore narcissism in CEOs and other high-level corporate positions such as chief financial officers. The relationship was found not only in the USA, but also in countries such as United Kingdom, Germany, Uruguay, Iran, South Africa and China.
Additionally, some researchers have studied the effect of larger versus smaller signatures on readers. For example, in a recent Journal of Philanthropy, Canadian researchers reported three studies that systematically varied the signature size of someone requesting funds for check whether this affected the value of donations. And it did. In one study, they found that increasing the sender subscription size generated more than double the revenue.
Where this research will take us next is anyone’s guess, especially for anyone who noticed something intriguing about subscription size all those years ago.
