Personality
What emotional deficits drive Machiavellian personalities?
Open access · cc by · source: Europe PMC
Machiavellian personality traits are closely linked to emotional difficulties, specifically a struggle to experience pleasure and trouble describing one's own feelings.
How this study connects
Role on claims
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Trouble describing personal feelings and reduced empathy are key emotional characteristics that strongly predict Machiavellian personality traits.
Evidence for the claim as stated.
Machiavellian personality traits are strongly linked to elevated levels of physical anhedonia, along with depression, anxiety, and difficulties identifying and describing emotions.
Evidence for the claim as stated.
Statistical modeling shows that an individual's inability to feel physical pleasure, combined with specific deficits in describing personal emotions, serves as a primary predictor of Machiavellianism.
Evidence for the claim as stated.
Study at a glance
- Design
- Cross-sectional — Mach-IV plus empathy, facial emotion recognition, depression/anxiety, and alexithymia measures
- N
- N=107 · 63 women; French general-population and student volunteers with at least a high-school diploma
- Population
- French adults without reported neurological or psychiatric history
- Outcome
- Machiavellianism scores predicted by anhedonia and difficulty describing feelings, with lower empathy and facial-emotion accuracy
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What emotional deficits drive Machiavellian personalities?
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one hundred and seven French volunteers
One hundred and seven native French participants (63 females), recruited from the general population volunteered to take part in the study.
thirty-six photographs of eyes
Thirty-six photographs of the eye region of the face were shown and each photograph was associated with four complex mental state descriptors printed around the picture (one at each corner).
Key findings
People with higher Machiavellianism scores showed lower levels of empathy and a reduced ability to read emotions from facial photographs. Conversely, higher Machiavellianism was linked to elevated levels of depression, anxiety, a lack of physical pleasure, and trouble describing personal feelings. Statistical models revealed that overall Machiavellianism was best predicted by the inability to feel pleasure and specific emotional description deficits.
Methodology
The researchers recruited one hundred and seven French volunteers to fill out a series of self-report questionnaires in their homes or classrooms. These surveys measured levels of Machiavellianism, depression, anxiety, the inability to feel pleasure, and difficulties identifying and describing emotions. To assess mind-reading skills, participants also completed a task where they had to identify complex emotional states from thirty-six photographs of eyes.
Limitations
Because this study is entirely correlational, it cannot prove that emotional deficits directly cause someone to develop a Machiavellian personality. Furthermore, the findings rely heavily on self-report surveys, which means participants may have answered in socially desirable ways rather than with complete honesty. Lastly, the sample was restricted to healthy, young French adults, meaning these relationships might not look the same in broader or clinical populations.
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