scholarly journals Social Desirability in Spouse Ratings

2018 ◽  
Vol 122 (2) ◽  
pp. 593-608
Author(s):  
Vaka Vésteinsdóttir ◽  
Eva D. Steingrimsdottir ◽  
Adam Joinson ◽  
Ulf-Dietrich Reips ◽  
Fanney Thorsdottir
Keyword(s):  
Social Desirability ◽  
Personality Assessment ◽  
Openness To Experience ◽  
Socially Desirable Responding ◽  
Social Desirability Scale ◽  
External Criterion ◽  
Self Reports ◽  
Observer Ratings ◽  
One Year ◽  
Do So

Whether or not socially desirable responding is a cause for concern in personality assessment has long been debated. For many researchers, McCrae and Costa laid the issue to rest when they showed that correcting for socially desirable responding in self-reports did not improve the agreement with spouse ratings on the Neuroticism, Extraversion, and Openness to Experience Personality Inventory. However, their findings rest on the assumption that observer ratings in general, and spouse ratings in particular, are an unbiased external criterion. If spouse ratings are also susceptible to socially desirable responding, correcting for the bias in self-rated measures cannot be assumed to increase agreement between self-reports and spouse ratings, and thus failure to do so should not be taken as evidence for the ineffectiveness of measuring and correcting for socially desirable responding. In the present study, McCrae and Costa’s influential study was replicated with the exception of measuring socially desirable responding with the Marlowe–Crowne Social Desirability Scale, in both self-reports and spouse ratings. Analyses were based on responses from 70 couples who had lived together for at least one year. The results showed that both self-reports and spouse ratings are susceptible to socially desirable responding and thus McCrae and Costa’s conclusion is drawn into question.

The Persnickety Pervasiveness of Rating Enhancement in Personality Assessment

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-13
Author(s):  
Alicia A. Stachowski ◽  
John T. Kulas
Keyword(s):  
Response Bias ◽  
Personality Assessment ◽  
Current Paper ◽  
Psychological Measurement ◽  
Shared Sets ◽  
Self Reports ◽  
Original Target ◽  
Target Profile ◽  
Do So ◽  
Normative Influences

Abstract. The current paper explores whether self and observer reports of personality are properly viewed through a contrasting lens (as opposed to a more consonant framework). Specifically, we challenge the assumption that self-reports are more susceptible to certain forms of response bias than are informant reports. We do so by examining whether selves and observers are similarly or differently drawn to socially desirable and/or normative influences in personality assessment. Targets rated their own personalities and recommended another person to also do so along shared sets of items diversely contaminated with socially desirable content. The recommended informant then invited a third individual to additionally make ratings of the original target. Profile correlations, analysis of variances (ANOVAs), and simple patterns of agreement/disagreement consistently converged on a strong normative effect paralleling item desirability, with all three rater types exhibiting a tendency to reject socially undesirable descriptors while also endorsing desirable indicators. These tendencies were, in fact, more prominent for informants than they were for self-raters. In their entirety, our results provide a note of caution regarding the strategy of using non-self informants as a comforting comparative benchmark within psychological measurement applications.

Coping, Defense and Socially Desirable Responses

1968 ◽  
Vol 22 (3) ◽  
pp. 985-988 ◽  
Author(s):  
Henry A. Alker
Keyword(s):  
Social Desirability ◽  
Socially Desirable Responding ◽  
Social Desirability Scale ◽  
Strategic Capacity ◽  
Defensive Behaviors ◽  
The Social

Coping and defensive behaviors, assessed by intensive interviews, covary, respectively, with the presence of socially desirable and socially undesirable inventory responses. Minimizing the influence of the social desirability variable consequently interferes with the strategic capacity of inventory items to index coping and defense. Furthermore, using low social-desirability scale value items most effectively discriminates between genuine and defensively distorted inventory responses. Neutral items are less efficient in this connection even though they minimize socially desirable responding.

Adequacy of Socialization as an Interpretation of the Social Desirability Response Set

1974 ◽  
Vol 35 (2) ◽  
pp. 887-892
Author(s):  
James A. Oakland
Keyword(s):  
Social Desirability ◽  
Personality Assessment ◽  
Test Scores ◽  
Personality Test ◽  
Social Desirability Scale ◽  
Individual Personality ◽  
The Social ◽  
Response Set ◽  
Cross Fertilization ◽  
Assessment Research

An interpretation of the social desirability response set as measuring, in part, the adequacy of socialization was supported in that the social desirability ratings of the 26 Ss with low scores on the Edwards Social Desirability Scale tended to be more varied than those of 26 Ss with high scores. It was suggested that this factor may be significant in the interpretation of individual personality test scores, that cross-fertilization between clinical theories and personality assessment research may be indispensible in this area, and that previous arguments for using ratings of social desirability as a means of personality assessment should be taken more seriously.

scholarly journals A Scale to Assess Student Perceptions of Academic Climates

2000 ◽  
Vol 30 (1) ◽  
pp. 89-122
Author(s):  
Teresa A. Janz ◽  
Sandra W. Pyke
Keyword(s):  
Student Perceptions ◽  
Social Desirability ◽  
Classroom Climate ◽  
Reliability And Validity ◽  
Academic Community ◽  
Socially Desirable Responding ◽  
Social Desirability Scale ◽  
Five Factors ◽  
Chilly Climate ◽  
Climate Scale

Sandler and Hall (1986) define a chilly academic climate as the "... subtle ways women are treated differently — ways that communicate to women that they are not quite first-class citizens in the academic community" (p. 1). This paper describes the construction of a scale to assess university students' perceptions of the chilly climate. An initial pool of 123 items was refined based on statistical analyses of the responses of 192 students to produce a 28-item Perceived Chilly Climate Scale (PCCS). Factor analysis identified five factors: Climate Students Hear About; Sexist Treatment; Climate Students Experience Personally; Classroom Climate; and Safety. To investigate further the reliability and validity of the scale, the PCCS, an Alienation Scale (Dean, 1961) and the Marlowe-Crowne Social Desirability Scale (Reynolds, 1982) responses were gathered from 327 students. As expected, the PCCS was significantly related to alienation but unrelated to socially desirable responding. Additional evidence supporting the reliability and validity of the PCCS is presented.

An Adult Version of the Coopersmith Self-Esteem Inventory: Test-Retest Reliability and Social Desirability

1978 ◽  
Vol 43 (3_suppl) ◽  
pp. 1189-1190 ◽  
Author(s):  
Muriel B. Ryden
Keyword(s):  
College Students ◽  
Social Desirability ◽  
Self Esteem ◽  
The Self ◽  
Adult Women ◽  
Social Desirability Scale ◽  
Retest Reliability ◽  
Self Reports ◽  
Test Retest Reliability

A version of the Coopersmith Self-esteem Inventory, modified for use with adults, was found to have a test-retest reliability of about .80 for 32 adult women over periods of 6 to 58 wk. Correlation of the scores with the Marlowe-Crowne Social Desirability Scale for a group of 51 college students was .47. Use of the lie scale on the self-esteem scale to identify subjects whose self-reports are markedly influenced by a social desirability factor can reduce this correlation to .32.

scholarly journals Rushing towards virtue: time pressure increases socially desirable responding

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Protzko ◽  
Claire Marie Zedelius ◽  
Jonathan Schooler
Keyword(s):  
Data Collection ◽  
Social Desirability ◽  
Time Pressure ◽  
Socially Desirable Responding ◽  
Alternative Account ◽  
Social Desirability Scale ◽  
Desirable Response ◽  
Intention To Treat ◽  
Treat Analysis ◽  
Gain Access

The oldest method in psychology of trying to gain access to one part of a divided mind is to instruct participants to answer quickly. Here we propose an alternative account for this procedure, namely, that it makes people give the socially desirable response. We randomly assigned 1,500 Americans to answer a social desirability scale either quickly or slowly. We use an intention-to-treat analysis to test the effects quick vs. slow responding on social desirability. We show quick responding causes an increase in social desirability. We propose that a number of findings using the fast/slow responding manipulation can be partially or entirely explained by participants’ giving the socially desirable response. Future investigations using the time pressure manipulation should account for social desirability to ensure the results are not entirely driven by this mechanism. This study was pre-registered prior to data collection at https://osf.io/rt6un/.

Patterns of Socially Desirable Responding Among Perpetrators and Victims of Wife Assault

1992 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 29-39 ◽  
Author(s):  
Donald G. Dutton ◽  
Kenneth J. Hemphill
Keyword(s):  
Physical Abuse ◽  
Impression Management ◽  
Emotional Abuse ◽  
Physical Violence ◽  
Socially Desirable Responding ◽  
Social Desirability Scale ◽  
Abusive Relationship ◽  
Wife Assault ◽  
Self Reports ◽  
Perpetrators And Victims

Wife assaulters attending a treatment group and women who had just exited an abusive relationship were asked to report on the extent of physical violence and emotional abuse in their relationship. Measures of socially desirable responding (SDR) were administered to both groups. Wife assaulters' self-reports of physical abuse correlated negatively with one SDR measure (the Balanced Inventory of Desirable Responding) but not another (the Marlowe-Crowne Social Desirability Scale); emotional abuse correlated negatively with both measures. Although physical abuse was primarily related to impression management, psychological abuse was affected by both impression management and self-deception aspects of SDR. Wife assaulters' reports of their own anger also correlated negatively with SDR. Both self-deception and impression management appear to contribute to underreporting of anger. Finally, abuse victims' reports of both physical and emotional abuse were unrelated to SDR.

scholarly journals Descriptive consistency and social desirability in self‐and peer reports

1989 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 31-45 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Borkenau ◽  
Fritz Ostendorf
Keyword(s):  
Individual Differences ◽  
Social Desirability ◽  
Rating Scales ◽  
Socially Desirable Responding ◽  
Personality Inventories ◽  
Self Reports ◽  
Peer Reports

In the present study, 300 subjects were administered 20 sets of four trait‐descriptive terms where aspects of content and evaluation were unconfounded (e.g. firm, severe, lenient, and lax). Each subject was also evaluated by three peers using the same sets of four trait terms. Moreover, the subjects responded to several personality inventories and rating scales, and they were also described on these rating scales by their peers. The results showed that the subjects frequently ascribed to themselves or to their peers two favourable trait terms that were descriptively inconsistent (e.g. firm, lenient). A measure of individual differences in socially desirable responding was constructed by summing all desirable responses. Subjects who described themselves in a socially desirable manner were less neurotic and more conscientious according to self‐reports as well as peer reports. Several implications of the findings are discussed, and the present SD measure is compared with several well‐known desirability scales.

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