Tamas Bereczkei
Professor Tamas Bereczkei is the former director of the Institute of Psychology in the University of Pécs. His research work comprises a wide area of topics: altruism and cooperation, Machiavellianism, mate choice, parental effort. With his colleagues and students, he has established The Evolutionary Research group of Pécs that operates several parallelly running research programs. He published more than 300 scientific papers, and he is the author or editor of 18 books. These publications have been given more than 4000 citations, worldwide. He has been teaching evolutionary psychology, genetics, research methods and other subjects for almost 45 years. During the last two decades he was the tutor of 17 PhD students. Tamas Bereczkei is a member of several Hungarian and international scientific societies and also editor of three journals. Beyond several scientific awards, he received the Officer's Cross of the Hungarian Order of Merit.
Research
Over the past decade, unexpected findings have been uncovered in the research of Machiavellianism. Whereas a lot of results of the former social psychological studies were confirmed, several assumptions must have been reconsidered. Machiavellian people, in fact, are “cold-minded” people but they also appear to experience intensive emotions in their social relationships. At the same time they are skilled at concealing these emotions that may promote the successful deception. In spite of the former theoretical expectations, Machiavellians poorly perform mindreading tests, but they can make relatively accurate judgments about their potential victims’ typical personality character. They wish immediate reward but they are able to adjust their decisions to the actual demands of the social situation, on long run. All of these characteristics may coincide with the Machiavellian intelligence hypothesis stating that manipulation played a crucial role in the evolution of primate cognitive abilities. The exploitation of the group members might be a strong selectionary force during human evolution that led to the development of flexible decision making, to the permanent monitoring of others, and to the precise evaluation of the particular features of the social environment. Our research project investigates the cognitive mechanisms underlying the Machiavellians’ decision makings and the social conditions leading to successful manipulation. It represents a multidisciplinary approach to this phenomenon that includes various studies on four levels: neurobiological, cognitive, affective, and personality.
Publikációk
ORCID
Research Gate
MTMT
Job title: full professor
Email: bereczkei.tamas@pte.hu
