The making of the Machiavellian brain: A structural MRI analysis (original) (raw)

Machiavellianism is a personality style marked by the use of such tactics as deception and manipulation so as to perform well and achieve power, status, or material wealth. Based on the assumption that Machiavellians are very sensitive to status seeking in social contexts, which leads over time to changes in neuroplasticity, we hypothesize and find that salespeople who score high versus low on the Mach IV Machiavellianism scale exhibit changes in gray matter volume in the following brain regions: basal ganglia, prefrontal cortex, insula, and hippocampus. A Voxel-Based Morphometry (VBM) advanced MRI technique is used to test the hypothesis on a sample of 43 healthy salespeople. Conjectures are made on the linkage between social psychological research on Machiavellianism and neuroscience research on the brain regions in question as they relate to social behavior.