Earty in the 16th century, Niccolo Machi-avelli 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 pos-terity in his 1513 book, The Prince. The gist

摘要: Four centuries later, these-ideas struck a chord with the personality psychologist Richard Christie, who noticed that Machiavelli'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 Machiavellianism. Those questionnaires, along with the research supporting their construct validity, were presented in Christie and Geis's (1970) book, Studies in Machiavellianism.