Psychological Profile of Machiavellians in the Study of the Symptom Complex of Manipulative Behavior Victims

Abstract

Fraud is widespread and every day it is more and more creative. Machiavellianism is of great interest for the symptom complex of fraud victims and resistance to manipulative behavior. The authors studied the psychological profile of the low and high machiavellians. The first hypothesis was that low machiavellians have different level of hostility, development of such traits as Consent and Conscientiousness, moral identity, anti-social creativity, and thinking styles, than high machiavellians. The second hypothesis said that machiavellians of different levels have different values. According to the hypothesis, low machiavellians value social focus, while high machiavellians value personal focus. The sample consisted of 150 students (the average age was 18.8 ±1.50). We used the fol-lowing adapted questionnaires: aggression (A. Bass, M.Perry), "NEO-FFI" of the question-naire "NEO PI-R" (P. Costa, R. MacRae), "Mac-IV", behavioral features of malevolent crea-tivity (N. Hao et al.), PVQ-R (Sh. Schwartz), CTI (Epstein). The questionnaire By K. Aquina and A. Reed II (2002) was used to diagnose the moral identity. Low machiavellians have significantly higher (according to the Mann-Whitney criterion) Agreeableness, Conscientiousness, moral identity, higher values of Social focus, General Scale of Constructive Thinking, Naive optimism and significantly lower anti-social creativity, higher values of Personal focus, Categorical thinking, hostility. Naive optimism significantly positively correlated with the values of Achievement, Security – personal, Security – Public, interpersonal Conformity, Universalism concern for nature, Benevolence as the sense of duty". According to regression analysis, the predictors of Naive optimism were the values Security – personal and Security – public. We have compiled a psychological profile of young people with low values of Machiavel-lianism. It includes such features as the importance of moral identity, low hostility, control of one's own impulses, cooperation with other people, consideration of the interests of others, overcoming personal interests for the sake of the interests of others, self-restraint and order. They will not use their own creativity to harm other people; they are able to adapt their way of thinking to the requirements of the situation. The peculiarity of low machiavellians is a high naive optimism, that is situational, and combined with the significance of the values of per-sonal and public security. Naive optimism can manifest itself in situations where somebody can offer something that is meaningful to a person with a naive optimism mindset. In such situations, it is possible to use unconstructive strategies, and be unable to recognize the threat. The listed set of characteristics creates a risk of being manipulated by fraudsters. The results show that thinking styles, values, and levels of self-control are important for the study of manipulative behavior victims and the study of resistance to such behavior in people of different age.