The Effects Of Machiavellianism On Risk Decision

The concept of Machiavelli was originally proposed by the Italian politician Nicolo Machiavelli in the "Monarchy" in the sixteenth century.Since then,psychologists have proposed Machiavelli on the basis of research on Machiavellim character.The main characteristic of Machiavellian personality is that it attaches importance to its own interests,in order to achieve its own best interests,it will arbitrarily despise rules and morals;it has indifferent interpersonal relationships and has strong control over others.Based on the main characteristics of this personality,scholars have designed different versions of the Machiavellian scale to measure the level of individual Machiavellianism.The current research on Machiavelli personality focuses on the relationship between Machiavelli personality and the Big Five personality,the relationship with self-esteem,and the relationship between Machiavelli and implicit and explicit attitudes.Risk decision-making has always been a hot research topic,but there were not many researches has focused on the performance of Machiavellianism in risk decision-making.The main direction of this research is to explore the performance of different Machiavellians in risk decision-making and their neural mechanisms.This study consists of two experiments: Experiment 1 explores the differences between the performances of High Machiavellians and Low Machiavellians in balloon adventure missions.The experimental participants were 119 college students,including 50 boys and 50 girls.All participants were divided into two groups based on their scores on the Machiavelli Doctrine,and then everyone performed behavioral experiments on a computer.Participants saw a group of balloons on the computer,and blew the balloons according to the number "1",and stopped blowing by the number "5" to save the balloons.The balloon grows or explodes after each blow.When the balloon becomes larger,the participant will get a corresponding virtual money reward.When the balloon explodes,the current balloon revenue is zero.The bigger the balloon,the more revenue.After the experiment was completed,the number of exploded balloons and the number of unexploded balloons were used as indicators to measure the risk-taking tendency.The more exploded balloons and the greater the number of unexploded balloons,the higher the risk tendency.All data were analyzed by repeated measures analysis of variance,and the results showed that the main effect of the reward amount is significant.The number of exploding balloons at 2.5 yuan is significantly less than the number of exploding balloons at 0.2 yuan.The interaction between the level of Machiavellianism and rewards is significant,and the number of 0.2 yuan balloons blown by high Machiavellians is significantly higher than the number of 0.2 yuan balloons blown by low Machiavellians.Experiment two mainly explored the differences in performance of high Machiavellians and low Machiavellians in derailment tasks and tried to explore their brain mechanism.Participants were part of the participants who participated in the first experiment.During the experiment,subjects saw four different faces on the computer: High attractive single pictures,high attractive love pictures,low attractive single pictures and low attractive love pictures.The EEG experiment uses the go-no-go paradigm.The participants indicate whether they are willing to date or fall in love with the person in the picture according to the numbers "1" and "2".Experiment two adopts the event-related potential experimental method.After preprocessing the collected EEG signals,it analyzes all the experimental data by repeated measurement analysis,and finds that: Behavioral experimental data show that high and low Machiavellians respond significantly differently to high-attractive love pictures;high Machiavellians respond to high-attractive love pictures significantly higher than low Machiavellians to high-attractive love Picture response.The results of EEG data show that: on the N1 component,the main effect of the attractiveness of pictures is significant,and the peaks induced by high-attraction pictures are significantly lower than those induced by low-attraction pictures.The interaction between the level of Machiavellianism and the picture is significant.On high-attractive pictures,the peak value induced by the low Machiavellians is significantly lower than the peak value of the high Machiavellians;In terms of the N3 component,the interaction between the type of graph and Machiavellianism is significant.The post-mortem inspection found that the peak value of the high Machiavellians on the high attractive single pictures is significantly lower than that on the high attractive love pictures,and the peak value of the high Machiavellians on the high attractive single pictures is also significantly lower Due to the peak in the low attractive love pictures.Conclusion: High Machiavellians have different risk-making decisions than low Machiavellians in simulated balloon adventure and derailment adventure missions.High Machiavellians showed a higher risk preference in simulated balloon adventure experiments.In the EEG experiment,the subjects all showed more attention to high-attractive faces.Compared with high-attractive love pictures,high Machiavelli also showed more attention to high-attractive single pictures,And did not show a tendency to have an affair with others.