# Psychology of Machiavellianism: Stop Trying to Be a Good Person

Channel: PsychToons
Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G7MFsZL5hCA
Duration: 16 min
Language: English
Words: 2855
Transcript page: https://viewrankai.com/tools/youtube-transcript/G7MFsZL5hCA

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[0:00] About 500 years ago, a Florentine diplomat who had just lost his job wrote a sentence people have been uncomfortable with ever since. A man who wishes to make a profession of goodness in everything must necessarily come to grief among so many who are not good. His name was Nicolo Mchavelli. The book was the prince and the world turned his name into an insult. Today, calling someone Mchavellian means they're cold, calculating, willing to use people. But look at that sentence again. It isn't describing villains. It's describing what happens to people who try too hard to be good. And if you've ever been the one who gets taken advantage of, the one

[0:35] who's too nice, the one everybody leans on and nobody backs up, it might be the most accurate sentence anyone has ever written about your life. Most people believe there are only two ways out of that. Either you stay the good person and wait for the world to finally reward you, or you give up, go cold, and learn manipulation so nobody can use you again. But when psychologists spent decades studying Machavevelian people, the psychology of Mchavellianism turned out to say something neither side expects. The Mchavellian's real advantage was never the cruelty. It wasn't even intelligence. It was that

[1:09] they weren't trying to be seen as good. And the part of you that's always trying, always checking whether you're being fair enough, kind enough, generous enough, is the exact part that keeps getting you beaten. You've been refereeing a game that everyone else is playing. Welcome back to Psych Tunes. Today we're breaking down the psychology of Machavelianism. What the research says actually makes Machavevelians win, why trying so hard to be a good person keeps backfiring on you, and how to [clears throat] take their edge without

[1:38] becoming someone you'd be ashamed of. This isn't a video about spotting manipulators. We've covered that on the channel. This one is about what they understand that you don't. Let's start with where the idea came from. In the 1960s, social psychologists Richard Christie and Florence Gist took ideas from the prince and turned them into statements people could agree or disagree with, like never telling anyone the real reason you did something unless it's useful to you. That became a questionnaire called the Mach 4. And in 1970, they published their findings in a

[2:08] book called Studies in Mchavellianism. High scorers, the high max, and lowcorers, the low max, were put into bargaining games, bluffing games, and games with real money on the table. Again and again, the highax came out ahead, especially face to face, and especially when the situation was loose and there was room to improvise. But the most important thing Christy and G found wasn't who won, it was why. The biggest difference between the two groups wasn't intelligence and it wasn't charm. It was how much emotion each person invested in the people around them. They gave the two styles names. The high mocks had the cool syndrome. The low mocks were the

[2:51] soft touch. To be fair to the evidence, these were lab games, mostly with students, and most are more than 50 years old. But a 1996 review led by David Sloan Wilson in Psychological Bulletin pulled together the research that followed and the core pattern held. In short-term face-to-face dealings, highs tend to win. Keep the word short-term in your pocket. We'll need it later. So, what is the cool syndrome made of? In 2018, a team including Katherine Collison and Donald Lam rebuilt the measurement and found that

[3:27] Machavellianism isn't really one trait. It's three traits sharing one name. Antagonism, the callous, distrustful, manipulative part everyone pictures. Agency, being ambitious, confident, and focused on getting things done. And planfulness, being deliberate, organized, and thinking before you act. In 2023, Bastian Cucalhaus and Ghard Blickla at the University of Bon tested which of the three actually pays off at work. They studied 550 working people with ratings from more than a thousand co-workers who knew them. Agency predicted career success. Planfulness helped indirectly. And antagonism, the manipulation and coldness toward people, predicted career success, neither directly nor indirectly. Sit with that for a second. The part of the Machavevelian that everyone fears is the

[4:22] part that doesn't work. What works is that they know what they want. They decide before the moment arrives and when the moment comes, they don't get lost in it. That's exactly what the soft touch can't do. When something is at stake, the high mock watches the score. The soft touch watches everything else. Is this fair? Is this kind? Is the other person okay? Am I still a good person right now? One of them is playing the game. The other has appointed themselves referee, checking every move for fairness, including their own, while the score keeps changing. And that difference shows up in three traps. Trap

[5:01] one, you go soft where it matters most. You walk in to ask for a raise. You've practiced the number. Then your manager, who you genuinely like, size, and tells you how tight the budget is, how much pressure they're under, how much they value you. Somewhere in the middle of that, your number quietly shrinks. You leave feeling good about how understanding you were. 2 days later, it hits you. You asked for less than you planned, and you can't remember deciding to. Inside Christy and G's book is a small study that explains this. Florence G and her colleagues had people bargain like a miniature legislature, trading votes on issues. Some issues were

[5:38] neutral, some were emotional, things people had real convictions about. On the neutral issues, high and low max did about the same. So the highaxs weren't simply better bargainers on the emotional issues. The highax won and the lowax lost by the widest margin on the exact issues they believed in most. It's one small study from 1970. So hold it loosely. But once you've seen the pattern, it's hard to unsee. When something matters to you, part of your attention leaves the negotiation and goes to what it means. The relationship, your values, how you'll feel about yourself afterward. The cool person keeps all of their attention on the outcome. You split yours three ways. And

[6:19] the cost is brutal. You don't get outplayed on the trivial stuff. You get outplayed on your salary, your boundaries, your time, the causes you believe in. The more something matters to you, the more easily whoever is across the table gets to decide it. Trap two, you give past the line. At work, you're the one who stays late to fix what someone else broke. You take the

[6:40] shift nobody wants. You never complain. Never ask for credit. Always say yes. In your mind, all of this is building loyalty and respect. Instead, you notice a strange chill. Conversations go quiet when you walk in. Someone jokes that you're making everyone else look bad, and it doesn't quite land like a joke. In 2010, psychologists Craig Parks and Asako Stone were studying how groups deal with members who take too much from a shared pool. As expected, people wanted the greedy members gone. What surprised the researchers was that people also wanted to kick out the unselfish member, the one who gave the most and took the least. More studies

[7:19] ruled out the idea that this person just seemed confusing or unpredictable. When they asked why, some people said the unselfish member was setting a standard nobody wanted to be measured against. Others saw them as a rule breaker. These were lab groups, not real offices. But if you've ever been the team overachiever, it sounds familiar. Every group runs on an unspoken level of giving. Go far past it and your generosity stops reading as kindness and starts reading as a comparison. Everyone who gives less now looks worse standing next to you. And people rarely think the person who makes them look worse. So the extra goodness doesn't buy you

[7:57] gratitude. It buys you quiet resentment and a reputation as the easiest person to hand things to. You end up doing the most and still standing outside the group you were carrying. Trap three, you audition. A friend shows you a business plan and you can see it's going to fail. You tell them it sounds exciting. A co-orker keeps making the same mistake and instead of saying something, you quietly fix it every time. You call this being kind. It feels kind, but ask yourself one uncomfortable question. Who was it actually for? In 1997, psychologist Daniel Batson and his colleagues ran an experiment that makes

[8:33] this question hard to ignore. Participants had to hand out two tasks. A pleasant one with a chance to win raffle tickets and a dull one. One for themselves, one for a person they'd never meet. They were told flipping a coin was the fairest way to decide and given a coin. About half didn't bother and just took the good task. The other half flipped. A fair coin should have given them the good task about half the time. Instead, roughly nine out of 10 flippers ended up with it anyway. Here's the key detail. People who flipped, lost, and took the good task anyway, rated themselves as more moral than

[9:06] people who never flipped at all. They bought the feeling of fairness without paying for fairness. Batson called it moral hypocrisy, wanting to look moral, even in your own eyes, while still coming out ahead. Now, stay with me because this is the part that might sting. A lot of what you've been calling being a good person is really being seen as one. And the main audience isn't other people. It's you. Most of the time, the white lie about the business plan wasn't protecting your friend. It was protecting your picture of yourself as supportive. Quietly fixing your

[9:38] co-worker's mistakes wasn't generosity. It was a way to avoid the discomfort of being the one who says something. You've been auditioning for the role of the good one for so long that you forgot it was a performance. And here's the irony. The thing everyone accuses Mchavellians of managing appearances is exactly what you've been doing. The difference is they know they're doing it. The cost is that you pay the full price of goodness, the discomfort, the silence, the extra work, and deliver almost none of the actual good. Your friend still launches the plan that fails. Your coworker still never learns. And anyone who can make you doubt that you're a good person can

[10:16] steer you because a little guilt is all it takes. Put the three traps together and you get the crulest paradox in this whole topic. The harder you try to be good, the less good you actually do. You lose hardest on the things you care about. You get pushed to the edge of the groups you'd make better, and you spend your moral energy on how your goodness looks instead of what it does. Being taken advantage of was never the price of being a good person. It's the price of being a good person on display. So, how do you get out? The internet has an

[10:45] easy answer. Stop being nice. Go cold. Become the Makavelian. The research says that's a trap, too. In 2016, Olgustrova and Daniel Alabro at the University of Cologne looked at national surveys that followed Americans over time. People who started out with a cynical view of human nature, the belief that everyone is secretly out for themselves went on to earn less years later. Across 41 countries, the cost of cynicism only shrank in places where cooperation was

[11:15] rare and cynicism was already common. Cynicism pays best in a world where it happens to be true. It's correlational and income depends on a lot of things, but going cold is not the shortcut people think it is. And remember the word in your pocket, short-term reviews suggest the Mchavelian advantage lives mostly in one-off encounters, and over the long run, the two styles seem to pay off about equally. Add that antagonism didn't predict career success at all, and the dark path looks far less impressive than it sounds. So, the answer isn't to stop caring. You couldn't if you tried. Your concern for fairness isn't a switch you can flip off

[11:55] any more than someone with perfect pitch can stop hearing a note that's out of tune. And you shouldn't want to. The goal is to change where you're carrying points. Three principles do that. Principle one, decide cold, deliver warm. Everything the highax did well came down to this. Their decisions weren't made in the heat of the moment. That's planfulness. So make yours before the moment arrives when nobody is sighing across a desk at you. Write down

[12:20] your number, your boundary, your answer. Before the conversation starts, then in the room, be as warm as you like. Warmth in how you say it, coldness in what you decided. Your kindness stays. It just doesn't get to renegotiate what you already chose. Principle two, be nice first, not nice always. Around 1980, political scientist Robert Axelrod ran tournaments where experts submitted computer programs to play a repeated game of cooperate or betray. The winner was one of the simplest entries called tit fortat. It cooperated on the first move, then copied whatever the other side did last. Every one of the top eight programs was what Axelrod called

[13:03] nice, meaning it never betrayed first. But programs that were too forgiving, that kept cooperating no matter what, got exploited, and couldn't survive. His summary of the winner came down to four words: nice, retaliatory, forgiving, and clear. These were computer programs, not people. So treat it as a model, not a proof. But it describes the kind of goodness that lasts. So make your kindness an opening move, not a standing policy. Start generous. Match what comes back. When someone takes advantage, respond calmly and clearly. When they go back to being decent, so do you. This is also how you stop giving past the line because your generosity follows what

[13:45] each relationship actually is instead of performing for the whole room. Principle three, grade the outcome, not the feeling. Batson's research had a hopeful side. When people were made more aware of themselves in the moment, the coin flips came out fair. Moral hypocrisy survives on not looking too closely. So look closely before any choice you're calling kind. Ask one question. Who does this actually help? Not will I feel like a good person, but will things be better for them? Sometimes the kindest thing is the honest sentence about the business plan. Sometimes it's letting a coworker face their own mistake. If a choice only protects your picture of yourself,

[14:21] that's the audition. Again, when you start living this way, something unexpected happens. You don't become a darker person. Your values don't change at all. you just become very hard to use. Nobody can shrink your number with a sigh because it was decided before the sigh. Nobody can drain your generosity because it follows what they give back. Nobody can guilt you into silence because you care more about what helps than about looking helpful. You finally hand back the whistle. You stop refereeing everyone else's game and start playing your own cleanly by rules you chose. The goodness on the other side is smarter. It has a plan. In 1944,

[14:58] in the middle of the Second World War, the theologian Reinhold Nebor wrote about exactly this problem. He called people who serve something higher than themselves the children of light, and people who know no law beyond themselves the children of darkness. The children of darkness are evil, he argued, but they understand self-interest, and the children of light usually don't. His answer wasn't to switch sides. He wrote that good people must be armed with the wisdom of the children of darkness while staying free of their malice. Makaveli told the good to learn how not to be

[15:30] good. Nebor gave the better answer. Learn what they know. Just never become what they are. So, which of the three traps catches you most? Going soft where it matters most, giving past the line or the audition? Tell me in the comments and be honest, especially if it's the third one. If you saw yourself in this video, you're not alone and you're not weak. You were being fair in rooms where fair wasn't enough. If this helped, hit like and share it with someone who's always the one getting taken advantage of. The friend who gives and gives and still ends up on the outside. They might need to hear that being good was never

[16:06] the problem. And subscribe to Psych Tunes so we can keep exploring the hidden corners of the mind together. Goodbye and see you next time.

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