Social desirability in personality inventories: Symptoms, diagnosis and prescribed cure

An analysis of social desirability in personality assessment is presented. Starting with the symptoms, Study 1 showed that mean ratings of graded personality items are moderately to strongly linearly related to social desirability (Self Deception, Impression formation, and the first Principal Component), suggesting that item popularity may be a useful heuristic tool for identifying items which elicit socially desirable responding. We diagnose the cause of socially desirable responding as an interaction between the evaluative content of the item and enhancement motivation in the rater. Study 2 introduced a possible cure; evaluative neutralization of items. To test the feasibility of the method lay psychometricians (undergraduates) reformulated existing personality test items according to written instructions. The new items were indeed lower in social desirability while essentially retaining the five factor structure and reliability of the inventory. We conclude that although neutralization is no miracle cure, it is simple and has beneficial effects.

• Publication year

  2013

• Venue

  Scandinavian Journal of Psychology

• Publication date

  2013-04-01

• Fields of study

  Medicine, Psychology

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1111/sjop.12015PMID 23252410PMCID 3618383
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar, PubMed

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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