Research About Machiavellianism As A Personality Character On College Students Based On Explicit And Implicit Measurements

Personality research was one of the most important research field in psychology and behavioral science, and provided extensive explanation for human actions. The dark side and the bright side of the personality both were important predictive variables of human behaviors. Researches on the dark side of personality made up the limitations of researches on the bright of personality such as the model of five factors. The study of the Dark Triad, viewed on Machiavellianism had drawn greater attention.People had impressed by Machiavellianism because it seemed like “a paradox”,such as strong achievement motivation, good impression management, pragmatism, good at controlling of the situation, and more ruthless, adept at manipulating, unchained from common morality. These characteristics which deeply rooted in human nature, Machiavellianism, more or less existed in individuals. When individuals exhibited these traits or showed behaviors with these characteristics, we called them “the high Machiavellian”, otherwise, they were “the low Machiavellian”. Machiavellianism as a scientific construct was developed in western psychology, while there were few domestic related research in China. On the basis of domestic and overseas researches, this study proved that Machiavellianism existed on the implicit level by using the task paradigm which called preference judgment that was one of the research methods on Implicit Social Cognition. Then, SC-IAT was used to measure the implicit Machiavellianism, and also, we designed an empirical research about Machiavellianism for college students.This research included three parts:Study1: It was an empirical investigation on the presence of Machiavellianism in college students, which was conducted among 390 college students from Sichuan University, Chengdu Sport Institute, Sichuan Normal University and other colleges. According to the results of the scale scores, the students were divided into different groups, and some of groups would engaged in the follow-up study.Study2: There were total 67 participants including 27 male and 40 female who came from the high score group in Study1. By using the Task Dissociation Paradigm(TDP), this study explored if Machiavellianism existed on the implicit level by using the Preference judgment test.Study3: 75 participants were selected from Study1, including 32 high-score and 43 low-score. By using SC-IAT, the variant test of IAT, Machiavellianism on the implicit level was measured, and then to prove if there were any differences with demography variableson the implicit Machiavellianism. Further, the relationship between the implicit and explicit Machiavellianism was explored.According to the analyses which was demonstrated by descriptive statistics, item analysis,factor analysis and difference tests and discussions, this research had achieved the following conclusions:1. The implicit Machiavellianism actually existed.2. Theimplicitand explicit Machiavellianism were different traits anddid not correlate with each other significantly.