Machiavellianism, and the 'dark triad' of personality
Do you consider yourself a shrewd manipulator? Are you cynical about the nature of human beings? If so, you might rank highly in Machiavellianism - a personality trait that's based on the writing and views of Niccolo Machiavelli, the 16th-century Italian political philosopher. We look at what makes a Machiavellian personality, and how it fits into the so called ‘dark triad’ of traits.
First broadcast 14 June, 2020.
Sana Qadar: If you've ever met someone who you thought was cold, manipulative, willing to win by any means necessary and you wondered why are they like that, this episode is for you.
It's the early 16th century in Florence, Italy. The Renaissance is in full swing, the Medicis are in a rocky period of their reign, and a man named Niccolo Machiavelli has been thrown into exile. He is an Italian diplomat and political philosopher, and it's during this time that he writes a book called The Prince.
Conal Monaghan: It was condemned at the time but later has been regarded, and in there what he basically argued is that it's better to be feared than loved if you can't be both.
Sana Qadar: Machiavelli's take was that people are essentially dishonest, gullible and driven to meet their own needs. So leaders should take advantage of that human nature to maximise their own gains. He also believed the ends justified the means. His ideas have had a lasting impact on politics.
Conal Monaghan: Napoleon and Stalin would be considered very Machiavellian. What they do is they engage in policies that are best for winning a war or what they feel is best to serve the greater good, even if it costs thousands of people their lives or their well-being.
Sana Qadar: And his views have made their mark on literature and pop culture too.
Conal Monaghan: Shakespeare's Richard III likens himself to Machiavelli and Machiavellian kind of behaviour in his works.
Daniel Jones: I can tell you that my grandfather introduced me to the Godfather movies very early, and Don Corleone is a fantastic example of a Machiavellian, right? Its bottom-line focus is any means necessary.
Sana Qadar: But it's only in the last 50-odd years that Machiavellianism has been formally conceptualised as a personality trait.
Conal Monaghan: Machiavellianism is a personality trait and it captures our willingness to exploit and manipulate other people for something that we deem is important.
Sana Qadar: I'm Sana Qadar, and today on All in the Mind, are you a master manipulator? Am I? We find out what makes a Machiavellian personality and how it fits into the so-called dark triad of traits.
Conal Monaghan: People who are highly Machiavellian tend to perceive others as distrusting and out for themselves as well.
Sana Qadar: Dr Conal Monaghan is a lecturer at the Australian National University's School of Psychology. He has been examining our tendencies for manipulation and exploitation in a study measuring Machiavellianism in thousands of people, including me. I'm going to take his test later in the program.
Conal Monaghan: And often what we see is people who are Machiavellian rationalise their behaviour as being for the greater good, so they are happy to exploit or to engage in things that we would typically see as immoral, because in their minds they can justify it.
Sana Qadar: When it comes to the spectrum of personality, Machiavellians find themselves in interesting company. Dr Monaghan says there is a strong link between Machiavellianism and psychopathy.
Conal Monaghan: There's about a 35% overlap between the two, which in psychology, given people are very messy and it's hard to measure people, that's considered a very strong overlap.
Sana Qadar: But despite their overlap, there are some clear differences. The first is how these two traits tend to form in our lives.
Conal Monaghan: There is a strong genetic component in psychopathy, so it's even seen at a young age with callous and emotional traits in young children as a kind of a precursor to psychopathy where we don't really see that in Machiavellian. When we look back at people who are highly Machiavellian, at their past, you can see high levels of very challenging life events, whether that's abuse, neglect or whatever happens to develop that cynical and mistrusting view of other people.
Sana Qadar: Right, so it's very much their environment that has made them that way.
Conal Monaghan: Yes, to a much stronger extent than psychopathy.
Sana Qadar: Another difference between psychopathy and Machiavellianism is motivation.
Conal Monaghan: Machiavelli tended to almost lament the need to use immoral actions. You know, it was not impulsive, not that kind of enjoyment, it was, well, unfortunately this is the way the world works, it's a dog-eat-dog world, and this is what you have to do to survive because other people will get you, so you're going to have to get them first, and that's what we tend to see in that differentiation to Machiavellian behaviour, that it is kind of strategic and rationalised, it's not really impulsive.
Sana Qadar: Right, so it's pragmatic, in a way.
Conal Monaghan: Absolutely.
Sana Qadar: So who is more likely to have Machiavellian personality traits?
Conal Monaghan: Men are actually much more likely to be Machiavellian than women. This is a very stable finding, regardless of the study.
Sana Qadar: And in terms of age?
Conal Monaghan: It's quite a difficult thing to measure, but what literature seems to suggest is that although it's relatively stable, kind of after the 30s or so it looks like there's a very slow decline into the later years.
Sana Qadar: But Dr Monaghan says it's also true that we all have some level of Machiavellianism in us.
Conal Monaghan: Everyone that we measure tends to be Machiavellian to some degree. You know, there's not people who are Machiavellian and people who aren't Machiavellian, it's just the degree to which you agree with his teachings.
Sana Qadar: So if you're wondering how you rank for Machiavellianism, there are different tests you can take. Dr Monaghan is part of a team that recently developed one. Their test is available online, which is how I took it, and I'll get to my results in just a moment. But first, a bit of background on the quiz itself. Dr Monaghan's test is designed to measure two dimensions of Machiavellianism; views versus tactics. The views measure looks at the extent to which you believe people to be weak and exploitative. Tactics is the degree to which you are willing to actually engage in manipulative behaviour to achieve your goals. Many of the questions ask you to rank how strongly you agree or disagree with a particular statement, like 'I value being honest over getting ahead'.
Now, this two-dimensional test builds on the work of earlier researchers, Richard Christie and Florence Geis. They were the first to conceptualise Machiavellianism as a personality trait and develop a method for measuring it back in the '70s. There quiz was called the MACH-IV and it wasn't really designed to differentiate between views and tactics. Dr Monaghan says his test tries to capture that nuance.
All right, so I want to ask you about the results that I got. So, my overall estimated Machiavellianism score was three, by Machiavellian views score was 3.25, and my Machiavellian tactics score was 2.75, and I believe this is out of a rating of seven, is that right?
Conal Monaghan: Yes, that's correct.
Sana Qadar: Okay, so I feel like I'm the kind of person who is ranking a little bit low on Machiavellianism, which I'm not too sad about, I think that's probably a good thing.
Conal Monaghan: Yes, actually it's very interesting, so when we give it to groups of people what we tend to find is the averages are somewhere around a 3.5. It's a little bit different obviously based on gender and culture and those kinds of things, but roughly 3.5 is a good middle, a good average.
Sana Qadar: Dr Monaghan's test gives you both a score and tells you what percentage of people you scored higher than. So, for example, my views score was 3.25, which was higher than 37% of respondents. In other words, if I walked into a room with 100 people, I'd have more Machiavellian views than 37 of them.
Now, my tactic score was 2.75, and that was higher than 44% of respondents. So, again, if I walk into a room with 100 people, I'd be more willing to engage in Machiavellian tactics than 44 of them.
A couple of things jump out at me here. First, because my views score of 3.25 is higher than my tactics score of 2.75, it seems I might have a slightly more cynical view of people but I'm less willing to actually act on that for my own gain. That roughly squares with what I already assumed about myself. I am definitely more cynical the older I get, but I'd like to think I'm not a particularly manipulative person.
The second thing that jumps out at me is slightly more confusing to explain. Basically, although I had a lower tactic score, I actually placed higher on the tactic spectrum. I won't rattle off the numbers again, but what that suggested to me was it's not just me that's less willing to engage in Machiavellian behaviour, people in general are also less willing to do so, even though they might hold Machiavellian views. I asked Dr Monaghan if my interpretation was correct.
Conal Monaghan: Yes, that's absolutely right. So when we measure people their response to tactics is definitely on average much, much lower. Views is kind of in the middle, whereas tactics seem to be a lot lower. So when you are reading these results, the raw scores, the number you got is kind of a little bit less important because a 3.5 on views is very different to a 3.5 on tactics. So the better number is that percentage, it's what percentage of people that you scored greater than and that gives you a better estimate of where you sit on the spectrum, just remembering that everyone is on there somewhere.
Sana Qadar: Right, okay. And so tell me a bit about some of the findings you've had from looking at the results of all the people that have taken these tests, anything that surprised you?
Conal Monaghan: I think as a good starting point was what you noted, which is actually kind of a lovely finding I guess, is that tactics on average is endorsed at much lower levels, so people, although being somewhat cynical of people, that willingness to engage in antisocial behaviour is actually much lower.
Sana Qadar: One thing to note is that Dr Monaghan's test, like the first one developed in the '70s, relies on self-reporting. Respondents are asked to assess their own beliefs and behaviour, and that can leave room for error.
Conal Monaghan: That's definitely a potential limitation of all questionnaires but specifically questionnaires that measure antisocial behaviour is what we call self-responding bias or impression management, they are trying to be perceived in a certain light, and definitely that's something that, in a more clinical sense, is kind of a stronger issue. One of the benefits of the website…
Sana Qadar: That's the website where the test is available to the public. We'll link to it on our site.
Conal Monaghan: …is that obviously it's completely anonymous and it gives your own feedback, and so the feedback to you is only useful to you. We are hoping it will reduce some of those biases because people are hopefully interested in actually knowing themselves, and there's not much point in trying to look good because no one knows the results, I guess besides you, Sana, thanks for sending me those.
Sana Qadar: I promise I wasn't trying to make myself look good as I went through the questions.
Conal Monaghan: We all believe you.
Sana Qadar: And you state that the test is not a clinical measure and should not be used to identify psychopathology, so what is the purpose of the test?
Conal Monaghan: The original work to develop the test was to aid in research into the construct, and antisocial behaviour more broadly. At the same time, we really didn't want to lock at this research into the annals of journal articles and into academic research. So the reason for building the website was largely around science communication, so it wasn't so much about collecting data but about allowing people a tool to both explore themselves but also to understand the construct of Machiavellianism and the kind of research that we've been doing.
Sana Qadar: And the reason the test isn't a clinical measure is because Machiavellianism isn't actually a diagnosis.
Conal Monaghan: It will likely fall as a component of antisocial personality disorder, but it in no way likens to a measure of antisocial personality disorder. But also, when we are looking at clinical measures, what we want is really, really super accurate understandings of where you sit. Although this new scale does give fairly accurate readings, they are not strong enough or accurate enough to be used for making your decisions on medication or anything like that or diagnoses.
Sana Qadar: You're listening to All in the Mind. I'm Sana Qadar and we are talking about Machiavellian personality traits.
Earlier in the show we heard that Machiavellianism is partially linked to psychopathy. Well, there's a third trait associated with those two, and it's narcissism. Together, these three—narcissism, psychopathy and Machiavellianism—make up what has been dubbed the dark triad of personality.
Now, there is debate among researchers about the legitimacy of the concept because of the overlap between the traits. Nonetheless, the dark triad has gained a lot of traction since it was proposed back in 2002.
Daniel Jones: So the dark triad was originally coined by Del Paulhus and Kevin Williams, his graduate student at the time, and they really were just interested in getting people on the same page with respect to the three most commonly studied personality traits when it came to interpersonal harm.
Sana Qadar: This is Dr Daniel Jones.
Daniel Jones: I'm an assistant professor in the Department of Management and Interdisciplinary Social Psychology at the University of Nevada, Reno.
Sana Qadar: Dr Jones completed his PhD under Del Paulhus, one of the originators of the dark triad concept.
Daniel Jones: Their argument was that folks in the business of psychology, personality psychology, were studying Machiavellianism, people in clinical and social were studying narcissism, people in forensic literature are studying psychopathy, and they may be talking about the same things. It's time to get us all on the same page and study them simultaneously to see which trait goes with which outcome.
And it wasn't until 2013 when I decided to…with my colleague AJ Figueredo, decided to figure out what the heck is linking these traits, and we did a series of analyses and found that all three of these personality traits are callous and all three of these personality traits are manipulative. So, in other words, they have no affinity for the truth and they have no affinity for you, they don't care about you and they don't care about the truth. Other than that, they are relatively independent of each other.
So if you break them apart, you'll see that callousness and manipulation is the common vein that runs through all of them, but psychopathy has unique elements to it such as impulsivity and a predilection for antisocial behaviour, reckless behaviour. Machiavellianism is callous manipulation, but they also have an ominous strategy to them, flexibility, adaptation, and that cynical worldview that seems to be unique to Machiavellianism. And the narcissism has this added element of entitlement and grandiosity, this overconfidence element to it.
I should point out that narcissism can also come in two forms; grandiose and vulnerable. So when we talk about the dark triad we are only really talking about the grandiose form. Vulnerable narcissism has more to do with neuroticism and entitlement. So those are the three traits that we talk about when we talk about the dark triad, and those are really what unites them and what differentiates them.
Sana Qadar: While the three traits are correlated (psychopathy and Machiavellianism the most of all), Dr Jones says you are unlikely to find someone who measures highly in all three.
Daniel Jones: That's a common question I get, is there a dark triad person out there, and I say possible but unlikely, and the reason it's unlikely is because one of the things that separates Machiavellianism from psychopathy is the ability to adapt and the ability to delay your impulses just enough so that you can work the situation to full advantage. Psychopaths cannot do that, Machiavellians can. So you either have impulse control or you don't. So that's the only element between all of these traits that is mutually exclusive, either you are one or the other. You can be an entitled Machiavellian, you can be a reckless narcissist, so these things can kind of congeal around a figure of that callous manipulation in different ways. But at some point you are either strategic or you are reckless, there's really no kind of strategic reckless person out there, so that would be my theoretical argument against combining them, but yes, they share a [unclear].
Sana Qadar: And so how common are people with Machiavellianism or elements of the dark triad?
Daniel Jones: Machiavellianism is definitely the most present in our population, followed by narcissism, followed by psychopathy. None of these in their extreme form are very common. Robert Hare estimated that around 1%, maybe half a percent of females and about 1.5% of males fit the clinical diagnosis for psychopathy, narcissistic personality disorder you hover around numbers of 2% or 3%. So I would imagine, given that Machiavellianism is the most present, even though it's not a diagnosable disorder, if we were talking about somebody who was extremely high on the MACH scale, I'd say maybe 5% of the population. So if you combine those three into considering the overlap among them and considering the unique features among them, I'd say you have still less than 10% of the population that would really fit a very severe dark triad, one of the dark triad characteristics, which is still disturbingly high in my humble opinion.
Sana Qadar: And can Machiavellian people change, can they treat these aspects of their personality, or should they?
Daniel Jones: Great question. There is research in 2008 that showed of the three dark triad traits, all three had a genetic component to it, using twin genetics. However, of the three, the only one that had…so just in genetics in general you have the straight genetic effect of a particular trait, you have the shared environment which is completely attributed to their developmental environment, and then you have non-shared environmental influence, which is kind of an error term for this sort of thing. And the genetic effect was significant for all three dark triad traits, but among the three, only Machiavellianism had a significant shared environment. So you can, through developmental environment, create I guess enough of a cynical and duplicitous environment, rewarding that type of behaviour where individuals eventually become Machiavellian.
So, the question is if you can wind them up, can you wind down. So are there effective interventions to lead somebody to be less Machiavellian? I have no idea that anybody has undergone that. What I can say is that there is a paper in '94 by an author named Barber that found Machiavellian individuals do not manipulate family members, and I have replicated that effect in several of my own studies, that once you get inside the family, almost like a Godfather thing, once you're family to them they don't seem to harm you as much as when you are a stranger.
However, I've also found that they are slower to trust than the average person, so once you are ostensibly within their inner circle they may not harm you as opposed to when you are outside of that circle. So I guess the intervention would have to target some form of getting people, humanity, to be inside their inner circle because it's really that cynical lack of trust that drives the duplicitous behaviour. So is there an intervention possible? I believe there is and I'd like to think there is, however I have not seen any clinical trials or so forth that has effectively reduced Machiavellianism in people.
Sana Qadar: Although Machiavellianism is part of the dark triad, a label which hardly inspires positive connotations, Dr Jones says it's not all bad. There are in fact some positive aspects to Machiavellian personality traits.
Daniel Jones: So one of the things that we are finding with Machiavellianism, there is some really great research by some folks in Europe, they have done some great work on showing that there is a sweet spot with Machiavellianism, especially in industry. If you are too low beyond a certain point of Machiavellianism, you're not a very good salesperson. And I gave a talk to real estate agents many years ago, and one of the things I said was, look, if you have somebody who really wants a house, they are having second doubts about whether that house is ideal for them and so on and so forth, it may be helping you to sell the house but it may also be helping them to quell their doubts and do these things, but if you are so brutally honest that you say, well, maybe it isn't the right house for you, you are not really helping the client and you're not really helping yourself.
Obviously you get beyond a certain point and it becomes maladaptive as well, but there is a sweet spot in the ability to manipulate the situation, and that's what these folks have found. So yes, there's absolutely adaptive qualities to it, and that's why they exist because people in certain ecologies and in certain environments throughout history have found ways to make these characteristics work for them, and as a result they have passed on those characteristics (either through development or genes or both, which is usually the case) to others and it has been working for them. So yes, there are definitely upshots.
Sana Qadar: So a little bit of Machiavellianism can help you in your career. But what if you are on the opposite end of that equation and you're having to deal with the Machiavellian personality type at work, perhaps a boss or a colleague? Here's what Dr Jones has to say about how you can cope.
Daniel Jones: I don't want to spill too much of my beans because this is actually the very next grant I'm writing. But I actually believe that by adopting certain Machiavellian practices you can inoculate yourself against Machiavellian behaviours, and we have found several datasets suggesting Machiavellianism can not only thrive in a toxic setting, not that they are necessary happy about abusive supervision, it still affects their ability to function, however we find that compared to the average dark triad person, Machiavellianism seems to do the best in these types of environments, comparatively speaking. So I think the way they approach the world, whether it be through their strategic and very calculated eyes, they tend to work a situation, even if it's a toxic situation, in a way that doesn't personally crash down around them.
And we have also found, and this is, again, kind of hot off the presses and needs replication and all this, but we have also found Machiavellians tend to be promoted in those environments. When they have a supervisor that tends to be selfish and exploitative, Machiavellians seem to be the ones that they choose to promote of their subordinates. So by adopting certain aspects of the Machiavellian character, and I want to emphasise this very greatly, not the manipulative cynical side, not the dark callous side, but by understanding their strategic nature, by understanding their bottom-line focus, their adaptability, their flexibility, you may find a way to adapt to these environments.
There was a reason why Machiavelli wrote what he wrote, there was a reason why Sun Tzu wrote The Art of War, there are strategies when you are in a battle, when you are embroiled in a political conflict that you need to use certain tactics and strategies, you cannot simply be forthcoming about every thought that you have, you have to be selective about what you say and when you say it. So I argue that drawing from the Machiavellian character to defend against the Machiavellian character, individuals can learn to protect themselves in a workplace environment without necessarily being a duplicitous scoundrel themselves.
Sana Qadar: What interests you about Machiavellianism personally yourself? Why have you chosen to focus on this in your research?
Daniel Jones: I love studying Machiavellianism, in particular among the dark triad, because it is the most misunderstood. Not only are these characters sneaky, as we would call them colloquially, in terms of their behaviour towards others, they are sneaky for researchers. Researchers have had a devil of a time pinning down what the Machiavellian character is and what it contributes to literature. A lot of people have tried to do away with the construct and things like that, with researchers claiming that Machiavellianism brings nothing to the table, it is a derivative and almost vestigial construct, it has been replaced and supplanted by psychopathy and it is no longer worthy of enquiry. I obviously do not agree.
I also think Machiavellianism is the most destructive, and a lot of people raise an eyebrow when I say this and say psychopathy is obviously the most destructive. The way I put it is that a narcissist will insult you, a psychopath will hit you and a Machiavellian will invade you. I don't believe at the societal level psychopaths can have nearly the footprint that Machiavellians have.
Look, if I was walking down a dark alley and there was somebody walking in the opposite direction and I had a lot of expensive clothes on and a lot of money in my wallet and that person had a knife, I would rather that person be a Machiavellian than a psychopath, let's put it that way. However, if somebody is going to hold political office and have a selfish agenda, one that may require thousands to die in order to accomplish that agenda, I'd rather a psychopath be in office because a Machiavellian would be able to manipulate the social ties, the political alliances and the collaborative forces necessary to destroy lives at a much larger scale.
Sana Qadar: That is a truly scary thought, that's really interesting.
Daniel Jones: They are all equally willing to harm to the greatest extent, it's just their strategies and their tactics that set them apart. So yes, I think a psychopath will get tripped up and detected pretty early and probably thrown overboard, but a Machiavellian would press all the right buttons.
Sana Qadar: We'll leave you to chew over that unsavoury trade-off in your own time. Thanks to Dr Daniel Jones from the University of Nevada who we just heard from there, and to Dr Conal Monaghan from ANU, who we heard from in the first half of the show. If you want to take Dr Monaghan's questionnaire to see how Machiavellian you are, we've put a link on our website.
Our producer is Diane Dean, and sound engineer this week is Martin Peralta. I'm Sana Qadar, thanks for listening, catch you next time.