But my friend didn't respond to my comments—I'd already lost her. Like a fundamentalist discovering she'd been roped into reading an evolutionary screed, she read no further.
“They're beautiful, they're elegant, they're vicious as hell…there's a real life lesson here somewhere.”
—Professor Ralph Noble, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute,
Psychology of Motivation class, Fall 1991,
on Siamese fighting fish
One might easily argue that the modern study of sinister people began in 1954—nine years after my sister Carolyn's birth. It was an oddly tenuous time to begin work in this area. The first clunky medical imaging machines wouldn't come online for another quarter century. Genetic analysis was an impossibility; the structure of DNA had only just been determined, and sophisticated gene sequencing methods lay decades in the future. In the social sciences, researchers not only didn't have the tools they needed to climb to a new level in penetrating the human psyche, they often didn't know they needed them. The successfully sinister, if thought of at all, were felt to be people who consciously chose, or were conditioned by their early environment, to be nasty.
Nobel Prize–winning biologist Albert Szent-Gyorgyi said: “Research is to see what everybody else has seen, and to think what nobody else has thought.”1 In the conformist 1950s, it would take a special person to see that duplicitous, manipulative, yet not necessarily criminal individuals were an interesting problem, worth defining and studying.
Psychologist Richard Christie was just such a person.
The groping progress of this brilliant researcher is worth following, not only because it underpins the modern study of devious behavior, but also because it gives an idea of the difficulties that investigators in this area faced in an era before imaging or genetic studies became available. After all, even now most people face the same difficulty Christie did in trying to understand the deceitful, conniving motivations and actions of the successfully sinister.
RICHARD CHRISTIE FOUNDS A NEW DISCIPLINE
In 1954, Richard Christie had been given a unique opportunity: a year off as a fellow of the prodigiously endowed Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, which overlooks Stanford University. The Center was a low-key, almost deliberately secretive organization that pampered its fellows with privacy amid a tranquil setting of blue skies, kelly green lawns, palms, live oaks, and camellias. (A quarter century later, this same landscape elixir would begin fueling the creativity of Silicon Valley.) For Christie, the hilltop Eden signaled both an expectation and a problem. The expectation was that Christie was to do something extraordinary. The dilemma was, however, that Christie had no idea what to do.
Christie soon discovered that fellows from other disciplines shared his dilemma. He wrote, “Most of us had never had a year without any outside commitments, and we were enjoying it in idyllic surroundings with others who were equally overwhelmed by their good fortune. After the initial shock had worn off, a period of contagious anxiety began to develop. What could we possibly do to justify this opportunity? Few of us were particularly modest about our scholarly abilities, but the perceived necessity of producing a Great Work was awesome.”2
What Christie wanted to work on was psychology's equivalent of Einstein's vision of a unified field theory. The problem was that unlike physics—where the equations themselves cried out for a unifying theory relating existing models of nuclear forces, electrical charge, and gravitational pull of the stars—psychology's science was a patchwork quilt of observations. What was important in psychology was often a matter of opinion. And opinion at the time was just beginning the long slide into the endorsement of behaviorism, where humans were thought to be capable of being shaped into anything—“doctor, lawyer, or Indian chief”—by simple reinforcement methods. The mind was a “black box”—the strict rules of behaviorism forbade hypothesizing neurological mechanisms for such psychological concepts as fear, desire, and consciousness. Only overt, observable behavior was thought to be the proper avenue for psychological inquiry. This type of black box thinking seems laughably wrong today, but it had an incalculably restrictive effect on a generation of psychological research.3
Itchy to find their Great Work, the fellows formed groups centered on areas of interest. Cynics observed that these groups appeared to be formed more for mutual alleviation of anxiety than any real scientific function. But still, conversation helped, and the supporting money and residence of the fellowship—similar to what Einstein had been given at Princeton—allowed Christie to sit back and put disparate strands of psychology research into perspective. Gradually, following his own instincts while talking with his new colleagues, Christie began to realize that the most important problem in his field was one that had, in the recent hellish years of World War II, profoundly affected virtually everyone on the planet: the problem of manipulative, deceitful leaders.
Machiavellianism.
The Prince, written in 1532 by Niccolo Machiavelli, was the first and is still among the best of resources at providing an in-depth description of the type of nasty behavior that Christie was trying to understand. As Annie Paul, a former Psychology Today senior editor, writes: “Machiavelli's matter-of-fact instruction that rulers must be prepared to lie, cheat and steal to hang on to their thrones—all the while acting the part of the benevolent leader—has not lost its razor edge. Even in this era of cynicism, Machiavelli's view of humanity as greedy and self-seeking or stupid and easily tricked still seems remarkably dark—and to some, remarkably relevant.”4
The real problem was to figure out what a modern, scientific understanding of a prototypical Machiavellian might consist of. Although there was a boatload of then-current literature on the duped followers of Machiavellian leaders, as well as on leadership in general, there were very few studies of unethical leaders themselves.
Christie and his colleagues would have to fashion a new discipline, one studying manipulative, duplicitous individuals from the perspective of social psychology. Only later would researchers notice parallels between Christie's Machiavellians and the more criminal-prone psychopaths outlined in the traditions of clinical psychology. By then, the benefits of viewing duplicitous individuals from Christie's nonclinical, more broadly sociological perspective would be too valuable to ignore.
Christie suggested that four sinister and manipulative, but not necessarily criminal, personality traits underpinned this new research area. In Christie's view then, Machiavellian personalities:5
View others as objects to be manipulated rather than as individuals with whom to empathize.
Lack concern with conventional morality. Lying, cheating, and other forms of deceit are acceptable forms of behavior.
Lack obvious psychopathology. Although perhaps not the epitome of mental health, contact with the more objective parts of reality would be within normal range.
Have low ideological commitment. They are more concerned with tactics for achieving possible ends than in an inflexible striving for an ultimate idealistic goal.
Christie's listing of sinister traits—predicated on the manipulator's lack of obvious psychopathology—eerily presaged characteristics that would resurface nearly half a century later in sophisticated technologically based studies. Faintly anomalous brain scans would reveal hardwired reasons for deception and manipulation, while peculiar patterns of cellular signaling, along with inheritance studies, would show the surprising involvement of genetics. In his own intuitive way, Christie was groping toward something innate but covert—something even more subtle than the thin mask of normalcy worn by the psychopath. By setting out a listing of key characteristics for Machiavellian personalities, Christie was sending up a flare to the technically fortified future: Here lies a problem. Here lie the clues.
THE UBIQUITY OF THE SINISTER
At the time, Christie and interested colleagues were unsure whether the hypothetical four-trait Machiavellian model they had created even existed outside the textbook world. And if s
uch Machiavellians did exist, there was no clue as to how common they might be or where they might flourish. So the small band of researchers took an unusual next step. Rather than study the pathological leaders of history books—history would come later—they decided to first tap a unique resource: the fellows surrounding them at the Center for Advanced Study. After all, virtually every fellow was either a luminary in the behavioral sciences or the protégé of one. Christie and his colleagues reasoned that interviews with junior fellows would give a great deal of information about the fellows’ sponsors, that is, the highly regarded research leaders who were responsible for the fellows’ training and for their being at the center.
Surprisingly, this seemingly simple interview step was a brilliant idea that would shape the whole of research in the subject for the next half of the century. The key was that Christie had begun to suspect that Machiavellian leaders were not best characterized by the rare Hitlers and Stalins and Maos that had all played such crucial and destructive roles in Christie's lifetime. Or, rather, they were not only those types of characters. Machiavellians might also appear as leaders in other areas, such as science, religion, business, or even charitable work. In fact, Machiavellian personalities might be present in small percentages of any group of people. In some sense, Christie was connecting the Punch cartoon characterization of the duplicitous Stalin and Hitler with equally devious everyday behavior, as depicted by cartoonist Matthew Henry Hall.
Fig. 1.1.
Christie burrowed into the interviews with junior fellows with gusto, uncovering apparently juicy material that he noted was “difficult (and possibly grounds for libel) to quote.”6 Most of the fellows reported respect for their sponsors’ intellectual abilities but, at the same time, felt little personal closeness or empathy from them. The sponsors’ cool, utilitarian, somewhat manipulative relationship with the fellows jibed with the first of the four Machiavellian role model traits. Sponsors also appeared to have, as Christie wrote with his usual deliberate understatement, “relatively little concern with middle-class conventionality.” Whatever their differing morality, however, sponsors showed no blatant symptoms of psychopathology—at least, nothing that was obvious to their students. That covered traits two and three. Ideological commitment, the last of the four traits, was harder to quantify. But it appeared that sponsors who were active in power positions generally didn't involve themselves in anything time-consuming. No tedious organizing petitions or rallies for them—their job was to tell others what to do.
Fig. 1.2.
All in all, the interviews were encouraging. Christie and his colleagues’ four key Machiavellian traits seemed to dovetail neatly with the junior fellows’ uncannily similar descriptions of their sponsors. But still, even if the four traits that had been devised were descriptive of a real Machiavellian personality type, the traits provided little guidance about how a person with those four characteristics would actually act, especially if he were in an important position.
To get a handle on how Machiavellian personality types operate, Christie and his colleagues studied both modern and historical attempts to understand people grappling for power. Their readings ranged from then-avant-garde political psychology, including Adorno's The Authoritarian Personality and Eysenck's The Psychology of Politics, to the two-thousand-year-old Chinese Book of Lord Shang.7 But Christie eventually concluded that Machiavelli's The Prince and its companion volume, The Discourses, were of a different quality altogether than any other text.8 “Unlike most power theorists,” Christie would later write, “Machiavelli had a tendency to specify his underlying assumptions about the nature of man.”9 In other words, Machiavelli provided a boilerplate description of Machiavellian attitudes.
PERVERSE ADMIRATION: THE DEVELOPMENT OF A TEST FOR MACHIAVELLIANISM
Christie's group developed a series of statements based on Machiavelli's work, along with other expressions that appeared to tap into the same syndrome. These statements were along the lines of “Barnum was probably right when he said there's a sucker born every minute.” Next, all fellows at the center who could be cornered were asked to go through and respond to each statement on a 1 to 7 scale that indicated the extent of their agreement or disagreement. The test was tweaked and retweaked; encouragingly, the group found that “the extent to which our respondents agreed with Machiavelli seemed to fit with our subjective estimate of their relative success in manipulating others.”10 These, Christie dubbed “high Machs.” Those at the other extreme—the people who would gladly give the shirt off their backs—Christie dubbed “low Machs.” Results from the final test found that people in general spanned a spectrum in their manipulative nature, with the majority of people straddling the middle. Although the test was developed to see whether the test-taker agreed with the ideas of a sixteenth-century Italian political philosopher, Christie found that it neatly delineated differences in temperament.a.11
Initially, Christie and his eventual collaborator, Florence Geis, had negative images of high Machs. But, after watching high Machs using their manipulative abilities—shadowy and unsavory though they might be—to trounce other players in certain games set up by psychologists, the two researchers found themselves developing a perverse admiration.
Research on Machiavellianism was to grow over the second half of the twentieth century. After all, virtually everyone has had experiences with a Machiavellian, and the new test provided the first easy-to-use tool to assess Machiavellian traits and personalities. Even working blindly, without the tools of modern technology, the fellows, through their methods and ideas, would provide a groundbreaking conceptual framework for studying the successfully sinister. Their findings would flesh out a context for the imaging and genetic studies to come.
But one major problem persisted. Christie's group was onto a new personality type—a “high Mach.” This was too new a concept to have a relationship with any personality type or disorder listed in the trusty Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (the “DSM”—currently on its fourth, text revision edition—the DSM-IV-R). And without being associated with a personality disorder in that particular psychiatric bible, it would be impossible to relate Machiavellian behavior to the many medical studies that had already been done on those personality disorders.
And so Machiavellian research stood as an eddy disconnected from much of the mainstream of psychological research. Christie himself would move on to other areas from his eventual academic perch at Columbia; a heart attack would cause this generous, decent man's passing in 1992. Conventional psychology involving duplicitous people continued to concentrate on criminal psychopaths and those with related clinically diagnosable conditions. It would not focus on Christie's high-functioning Machiavellians who could rise so artfully in various social structures. There were no real answers for those who wanted to understand the Hitlers, Maos, and bin Ladens of their day, much less the two-timing cheat of a husband who dotes on his daughter even as he emotionally abuses his long-suffering wife; or the manipulative, domineering mother-in-law; or the duplicitous supervisor who takes credit for every good idea his subordinates devise. Those answers, and the connection between Machiavellianism and clinical studies, were to come from an unlikely source.
* * *
a.You can take the test online at www.salon.com/books/it/1999/09/13/machtest. As the test states: “High Machs constitute a distinct type: charming, confident and glib, but also arrogant, calculating and cynical, prone to manipulate and exploit…. True low Machs, however, can be kind of dependent, submissive and socially inept. So be sure to invite a high Mach or two to your next dinner party.”
“…and he's refreshingly free of emotional baggage.”
—Tonya, The Tonya Show, apropos her pet iguana Spiro
Psychology professor John McHoskey was different. At least, that's what the evaluations suggested on a popular nationwide Web site that critiques college professors. “Looks hot with a shaved head, but he is quite an odd man,” declared a student in one o
f the few kind reviews.
And indeed, McHoskey was a difficult man to reach, hunkered down as he was then at Eastern Michigan University in rural Ypsilanti—a small, improbably named town a lot like Peoria but without the glitter. But despite, or perhaps because, of his reclusiveness, John McHoskey is one of the world's leading experts on Machiavellianism—his research on the topic is world-class. Through nearly half a dozen meticulously researched journal papers, he has explored the relationship between Machiavellianism and such topics as narcissism, ethics, and sexuality. Perhaps his most significant paper, however, was one relating Machiavellianism to psychopathy—a tour de force of research that garnered its author an unofficial crown (princely, of course) in Machiavellian studies.1 This paper argued convincingly that Machiavellianism and psychopathy are one and the same—any apparent differences simply arose from flukes of history. Personality psychologists and social psychologists, McHoskey pointed out, had been studying the topic under the name “Machiavellianism,” while clinical psychologists had studied the same personality construct and called it “psychopathy.”
ANTISOCIAL PERSONALITY DISORDER
McHoskey wasn't actually the first to see the similarity between Machiavellianism and psychopathy, as he himself noted. But McHoskey was the first to take a close look at the overlap between the two personality types. The puzzle for everyone is how there could be people who can do bad—even horrendous—things to others without feeling guilt. Historical attempts to explain such personality types extend as far back as the early 1800s, when Cesare Lombroso attempted to explain the biological roots of lawbreaking, and Emile Durkheim saw crime in terms of social factors.2 Nowadays, the official DSM-IV term for the broad category into which psychopathy fits is antisocial personality disorder, a syndrome in which people show a pervasive pattern of disregard for and violation of the rights of others, occurring since the age of fifteen. The DSM-IV is very specific about this—a person has to have at least three of the following traits:
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