Why It's So Hard to Catch a Master Manipulator

The master manipulator, a person high in Machiavellianism, is a person you want to avoid. People high in psychopathy are bad enough, but the Machiavellian, consistent with the name, wants to take you for all you’re worth. Good ones will get away with all kinds of mischief, never to be detected until it’s too late.

Perhaps you’ve encountered such a master manipulator (let’s call it MM) in your own life, much to your regret. You planned with this person to celebrate a holiday occasion with some of your mutual pals. However, to your confusion and concern, the MM tells you not to invite the person you like the most in this group. The two of them fell out, and now you have to take action that will hurt this person’s feelings. You did it anyway, and now you’ve lost someone whose friendship you valued. Why did you go along with this scheme in the first place?

Machiavellianism’s Two Faces

According to the University of Novo Sad’s Christian Blötner and colleagues (2024), those high in the personality trait of Machiavellianism are “ruthless, strategic, and exploitative” (p. 2). However, as clearly bad as they sound, these qualities have proven extraordinarily difficult to quantify. Part of the problem, the Serbian-led research team maintains, is that previous researchers veered away from the “core themes of Niccolò Machiavelli’s work" (that is, the infamous political writer who the quality is named after).

The tactics that fit more closely into the Machiavellian themes should be, as Christian Blötner and colleagues argue, “resource acquisition and prevention of loss.” In psychological terms, these equate to “approach” (wanting things) and “avoidance” (wanting to avoid losing those things). That’s what a scale measuring this quality should measure, they argue.

However, there is one slight problem that researchers in this area run into, complicating the work of the Blötner team. You might be familiar with the “dark triad,” the collection of aversive traits that include Machiavellianism along with psychopathy and narcissism. Because psychopaths also try to manipulate and take advantage of you, they become difficult to distinguish clearly from the exploitative Machiavellans. A good scale of Machiavellianism should be able to make that discrimination; so far none have.

Digging deeper into the psychology of Machiavellianism, the authors suggest that this quality, unlike psychopathy, should incorporate cynicism as a core trait. These individuals should also score high on the qualities of disagreeableness and dishonesty. Based on prior research, Blötner and colleagues suggest including high levels of impulsivity.

Creating and Testing the New Machiavellianism Measure

With this sound reasoning, it would seem that maybe it would be possible to create a Machiavellianism scale that could actually work, both from a statistical point of view and a conceptual one (that is, distinct from psychopathy). The University of Novo Sad created such a measure, the Machiavellian Approach and Avoidance Questionnaire (MAAQ). They tested the MAAQ on two German samples and a cross-national sample that included Canadian, British, and Serbian online samples (including age ranges from 18 to 66). To test the scale’s validity, the author team also administered related personality scales of psychopathy, honesty-humility, agreeableness, emotionality, mistrust, aggression, impulsivity, cynicism, and dominance.

You can rate yourself on each MAAQ item from 1 (strongly disagree) to 5 (strongly agree):

I tend to manipulate others to get my own way.
I have a strong desire for power.
I like to give the orders in interpersonal situations.
I enjoy having control over other people.
Anyone who completely trusts anyone else is asking for trouble.
If I show any weakness, other people will take advantage of it.
People are friendly to each other only because of ulterior motives.
There is something malicious in every human being. You just have to look for it.

The full analysis of MAAQ measurement qualities revealed good and not-good news. On the positive side, as predicted, the first 4 items fell into the “approach” factor and the last four into “avoidance.” However, capturing the nuances distinguishing these scales from psychopathy proved to be only partly successful. As the authors concluded, “Many findings addressing construct validity, in turn, militate against the separation of Machiavellian approach from subclinical psychopathy, and hypotheses on several assumed core features of Machiavellian approach and Machiavellian avoidance could not be supported” (p. 11). Cross-nationally, most of the findings contained these inextricable linkages, but Machiavellian avoidance did seem to stand out as higher in Germany than Serbia, supporting the idea that it’s important to validate instruments across different cultures.

Machiavellianism Essential Reads

The Myth of the Machiavellian Leader

How Personality Drives Major Choices in Business Fields

What the Findings Mean for Finding Machiavellian’s

What went wrong with this well-conceived study? It’s always hard and scientifically questionable, as the authors note, to interpret the lack of predicted findings. However, as much as they tried to squeeze psychopathy out of the mix, Blötner and colleagues simply could not. As you go back and read through the MAAQ questions, it might strike you that none of them seem particularly admirable. If ordinary people are faced with rating themselves on these qualities, they might find admitting to these attributes to be so distasteful that they just flatly disagree. Wouldn’t the truly Machiavellian person be precisely the one to deny having any of the MAAQ items apply to them? They may also, based on a lifetime of scooting around society's norms, not even know that the MAAQ shoes actually fit them. The other possibility is that psychopathy and Machiavellianism do reside in the same personality space and will never be statistically disentangled.

On the other hand, for all practical purposes, the MAAQ could have some value. It may work out just fine as a way to rate someone else, assuming you've been burned enough to see through their ruses. For fun, use those same items to gauge the personality of someone you suspect might be an MM, like that supposed friend of yours, to see if they may have this personality profile. Even if there are shades of psychopathy in their manipulative tendencies, these additional exploitative qualities are worth knowing about.

To sum up, the master manipulator finds many ways to hide, even from expert personality researchers. Keep on your guard for these basic qualities, and you’ll be better able to extricate yourself from their grip.

Facebook image: Gorgev/Shutterstock