I keep my mind on my money and my money on my mind: Trait Machiavellianism in business majors

Abstract

Recent research has shown a particularly positive association between Machiavellianism and academic major choices, namely Economics, Law, and Politics. Interestingly, previous findings indicated that the academic major Business – usually portrayed as power-hungry and greedy in mainstream media and movies – was not positively associated with Machiavellianism. In this paper, we posit that these prior results are incomplete since Business is a college major encompassing several sub-fields (e.g., Advertising, Finance, Human Resources). Using a sample of 2630 participants from 110 countries and nine business majors, we found overall support for a significant association between Machiavellianism and specific business specializations, with Finance majors scoring highest on Machiavellianism. We compare these findings to prior results and break down results by gender.

Keywords

• Machiavellianism
• Business education
• Personality
• Academic major
• College