The Machiavellian Approach and Avoidance Questionnaire: Further Validation and Evidence of Cross-National Validity
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Researchers on antagonistic personality traits debate about an appropriate measurement approach to Machiavellianism. One measure intended to resolve this discourse, the Machiavellian Approach and Avoidance Questionnaire (MAAQ), distinguishes motivational aspects of Machiavellianism (https://doi.org/10.1037/pas0001069). Machiavellian Approach reflects strategic striving for advantages (even at others’ expense), and Machiavellian Avoidance encompasses misanthropically driven prevention of loss. Using two German samples (ntotal = 1,583; 63% women), evidence from our first study confirmed assumed relations between both facets and disagreeableness, as well as Machiavellian approach with dominance seeking, and Machiavellian avoidance with mistrust. However, the nomological networks of Machiavellian approach and measures of subclinical psychopathy were almost identical in both samples. Thus, the MAAQ failed to sufficiently differentiate from subclinical psychopathy. In a second study, partial scalar cross-national invariance was established across samples from Germany, Canada, United Kingdom, and Serbia (ntotal = 1,853). Thereby, participants from Germany scored lower in Machiavellian approach compared to other samples, lower in Machiavellian avoidance compared to samples from the United Kingdom and Canada, but higher compared to the Serbian sample. Overall, findings supported cross-national equivalence of the MAAQ but undermined construct validity.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".