Abstract: The manipulative strategy of Machiavellianism is often considered to be successful despite the poor emotion recognition abilities of the person with high Mach scores. The better we recognize others’ emotions, the easier it gets to understand them – for a manipulator, it means the easier it would get to take advantage of them. However, with worse emotion recognition skills and lower level of emotional intelligence, Machiavellianists must develop other abilities to understand others, and with the lack of empathy, exploit them without hesitation or repentance. Previous findings suggest this ability is the Theory of mind, but evidences are unconvincing and vary with each research. In this paper we look into the relationship of Machiavellianism, emotion recognition, emotional intelligence and Theory of mind, using not only self-report questionnaires, but performance tasks for more legitimate results.