Socially desirable responding and its elusive effects on the validity of personality assessments

Journal of Personality and Social Psychology
S V Paunonen, Etienne P LeBel

Abstract

Past studies of socially desirable self-reports on the items of personality measures have found inconsistent effects of the response bias on the measures' predictive validities, with some studies reporting small effects and other studies reporting large effects. Using Monte Carlo methods, we evaluated various models of socially desirable responding by systematically adding predetermined amounts of the bias to the simulated personality trait scores of hypothetical test respondents before computing test-criterion validity correlations. Our study generally supported previous findings that have reported relatively minor decrements in criterion prediction, even with personality scores that were massively infused with desirability bias. Furthermore, the response bias failed to reveal itself as a statistical moderator of test validity or as a suppressor of validity. Large differences between some respondents' obtained test scores and their true trait scores, however, meant that the personality measure's construct validity would be severely compromised and, more specifically, that estimates of those individuals' criterion performance would be grossly in error. Our discussion focuses on reasons for the discrepant results reported in the...Continue Reading

Citations

Jul 19, 2014·International Journal of Psychophysiology : Official Journal of the International Organization of Psychophysiology·Martin J TurnerPeter Coffee
Mar 3, 2015·Journal of Personality·Sampo V Paunonen
Jul 24, 2015·Clinical Psychology & Psychotherapy·Eline C JochemsNiels L Mulder
Jul 1, 2016·Journal of Personality Assessment·Christopher T BarryAlexandra C Anderson
Oct 4, 2016·Perspectives on Psychological Science : a Journal of the Association for Psychological Science·Sara SteegenWolf Vanpaemel
Nov 29, 2015·Personality & Social Psychology Bulletin·Stephen T La MacchiaFiona Kate Barlow
Apr 22, 2015·Personality and Social Psychology Review : an Official Journal of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, Inc·Dustin Wood, R Michael Furr
Jun 9, 2016·The Journal of Trauma and Acute Care Surgery·Tanya Charyk StewartNeil Merritt
Jan 1, 2017·Educational and Psychological Measurement·Hansjörg Plieninger
Aug 15, 2020·Frontiers in Psychology·Stepan Vesely, Christian A Klöckner
Dec 17, 2020·Frontiers in Psychology·Martin BäckströmAriela Costa
Jul 9, 2021·The British Journal of Educational Psychology·Julien S BureauGeneviève A Mageau

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