The mediating role of Machiavellianism on Interaction Involvement and Social Desirability among adults

The study examined how tactics and views dimensions of Machiavellianism as a whole, with social desirability, may affect interpersonal communication to gain benefits from others. The study included 190 participants across India (97 males, 91 females and 2 non-binary) with an inclusion criterion that they should not have any diagnosed psychological disorder/condition and the treatment for the same should not be ongoing. The study used a correlational non-experimental research design incorporating mediation and regression analysis to examine the predictive and interactive relationship between variables. The study revealed that there was a weak negative correlation between Machiavellianism and interaction involvement; a negative moderate correlation between social desirability and Machiavellianism, and a positive weak correlation between social desirability and interaction involvement, suggesting this weak correlation could be due to scattered data, which is not linear. The results of mediation suggest that there is a partial direct effect of social desirability on interaction involvement that is highly significant, making the total effect significant. In addition to this, the p-value for the indirect effect caused by Machiavellianism is 0.073, suggesting a possible indirect effect, supporting that there is a trend of mediation.