摘要: e arly in the 16th century, Niccolo Machiavelli acted as chief political advisor to the ruling Medici family in Florence, Italy. The details of his counsel are well known because Machiavelli laid them out for posterity in his 1513 book, The Prince. The gist of his advice for maintaining political control is captured in the phrase “the end justi-fies the means.” According to Machiavelli, a ruler with a clear agenda should be open to any and all effective tactics, including manipulative interpersonal strategies such as flattery and lying. Four centuries later, these ideas struck a chord with the personality psychologist Richard Christie, who noticed that Ma-chiavelli’s political strategies had parallels in people’s everyday social behavior. Chris-tie and his colleagues at Columbia University identified a corresponding personality syndrome, which they dubbed Machiavellianism. The label was chosen to capture a duplicitous interpersonal style assumed to emerge from a broader network of cynical beliefs and pragmatic morality. Christie applied his psychometric expertise to develop a series of questionnaires designed to tap individual differences in Machiavellian-ism. Those questionnaires, along with the research supporting their construct valid-ity, were presented in Christie and Geis’s (1970) book, Studies in Machiavellianism. Of these measures, by far the most popular has been the Mach IV. 1 Used in more than 2,000 cited studies, the scale has proved valuable in studying manipulative tendencies among student, community, and worker samples. The follow-up version, Mach V, was designed as an improvement but, in the end, raised more problems than it solved …