Individual Differences in Faking Integrity Tests

2002 ◽  
Vol 91 (3) ◽  
pp. 691-702 ◽  
Author(s):  
Reagan D. Brown ◽  
Christopher M. Cothern
Keyword(s):  
Individual Differences ◽  
Cognitive Ability ◽  
Test Scores ◽  
Item Type ◽  
General Cognitive Ability ◽  
Positive Relation ◽  
Integrity Test ◽  
The Difference ◽  
Integrity Tests ◽  
Fake Good

The present study assessed whether success at faking a commercially available integrity test relates to individual differences among the test takers. We administered the Reid Report, an overt integrity test, twice to a sample of college students with instructions to answer honestly on one administration and “fake good” on the other. These participants also completed a measure of general cognitive ability, the Raven Advanced Progressive Matrices. Integrity test scores were 1.3 standard deviations higher in the faking condition ( p < .05). There was a weak, but significant, positive relation between general cognitive ability and faking success, calculated as the difference in scores between the honest and faked administrations of the Reid Report ( r = .17, p < .05). An examination of the correlations between faking success and general cognitive ability by item type suggested that the relation is due to the items that pose hypothetical scenarios, e.g., “Should an employee be fired for stealing a few office supplies?” ( r = .22, p < .05) and not the items that ask for admissions of undesirable past behaviors, e.g., “Have you ever stolen office supplies?” ( r = .02, p > .05; t = 2.06, p < .05) for the difference between correlations. These results suggest that general cognitive ability is indeed an individual difference relevant to success at faking an overt integrity test.

The Susceptibility of Overt and Covert Integrity Tests to Coaching and Faking

1996 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 32-39 ◽  
Author(s):  
George M. Alliger ◽  
Scott O. Lilienfeld ◽  
Krystin E. Mitchell
Keyword(s):  
Test Scores ◽  
Integrity Test ◽  
Test Coaching ◽  
Test Items ◽  
Validity Scale ◽  
Counterproductive Behavior ◽  
Simple Rules ◽  
Scale Scores ◽  
Integrity Tests ◽  
Fake Good

Although previous research has indicated that faking can affect integrity test scores, the effects of coaching on integrity test scores have never been examined We conducted a between-subjects experiment to assess the effects of coaching and faking instructions on an overt and a covert integrity test Coaching provided simple rules to follow when answering test items and instructions on how to avoid elevated validity scale scores There were five instruction conditions “just take,” “fake good,” “coach overt,” “coach covert,” and coach both All subjects completed both overt and covert tests and a measure of intelligence Results provided strong evidence for the coachability of the overt integrity test, over and above the much smaller elevation in the faking condition The covert test apparently could be neither coached nor faked successfully Scores on both integrity tests tended to be positively correlated with intelligence in the coaching and faking conditions We discuss the generalizability of these results to other samples and other integrity tests, and the relevance of the coachability of integrity tests to the ongoing debate concerning the prediction of counterproductive behavior

Sex Differences in Childhood Associations between DNA Markers and General Cognitive Ability

2007 ◽  
Vol 28 (3) ◽  
pp. 161-164 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rosalind Arden ◽  
Nicole Harlaar ◽  
Robert Plomin
Keyword(s):  
Sex Differences ◽  
Single Nucleotide Polymorphisms ◽  
Cognitive Ability ◽  
Dna Markers ◽  
Community Sample ◽  
Nucleotide Polymorphisms ◽  
General Cognitive Ability ◽  
Single Nucleotide ◽  
The Difference

Abstract. An association between intelligence at age 7 and a set of five single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) has been identified and replicated. We used this composite SNP set to investigate whether the associations differ between boys and girls for general cognitive ability at ages 2, 3, 4, 7, 9, and 10 years. In a longitudinal community sample of British twins aged 2-10 (n > 4,000 individuals), we found that the SNP set is more strongly associated with intelligence in males than in females at ages 7, 9, and 10 and the difference is significant at 10. If this finding replicates in other studies, these results will constitute the first evidence of the same autosomal genes acting differently on intelligence in the two sexes.

Intelligence demands flexibility: Individual differences in attentional disengagement strongly predict the general cognitive ability of mice

2020 ◽  
Vol 71 ◽  
pp. 101657 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dylan W. Crawford ◽  
Sophie Bendrath ◽  
Margarita D. Manzano ◽  
Aasav Mehta ◽  
Himali M. Patel ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Individual Differences ◽  
Cognitive Ability ◽  
General Cognitive Ability ◽  
Attentional Disengagement

scholarly journals An investigation of Social Class Inequalities in General Cognitive Ability in Two British Birth Cohorts

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Roxanne Connelly ◽  
Vernon Gayle
Keyword(s):  
Social Class ◽  
Cognitive Ability ◽  
Test Scores ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Parental Education ◽  
General Cognitive Ability ◽  
Birth Cohorts ◽  
Ability Test ◽  
British Cohort Study ◽  
Nationally Representative

The ‘Flynn effect’ describes the substantial and long-standing increase in average cognitive ability test scores, which has been observed in numerous psychological studies. Flynn makes an appeal for researchers to move beyond psychology’s standard disciplinary boundaries and to consider sociological contexts, in order to develop a more comprehensive understanding of cognitive inequalities. In this article we respond to this appeal and investigate social class inequalities in general cognitive ability test scores over time. We analyse data from the National Child Development Study (1958) and the British Cohort Study (1970). These two British birth cohorts are suitable nationally representative large-scale data resources for studying inequalities in general cognitive ability.We observe a large parental social class effect, net of parental education and gender in both cohorts. The overall finding is that large social class divisions in cognitive ability can be observed when children are still at primary school, and similar patterns are observed in each cohort. Notably, pupils with fathers at the lower end of the class structure are at a distinct disadvantage. This is a disturbing finding and it is especially important because cognitive ability is known to influence individuals later in the lifecourse.

scholarly journals Using Standardized Test Scores to Include General Cognitive Ability in Education Research and Policy

2018 ◽  
Vol 6 (3) ◽  
pp. 37 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jonathan Wai ◽  
Matt Brown ◽  
Christopher Chabris
Keyword(s):  
Education Research ◽  
Education Policy ◽  
Cognitive Ability ◽  
Test Scores ◽  
Statistical Power ◽  
Standardized Test ◽  
The United States ◽  
Standardized Test Scores ◽  
High Status ◽  
General Cognitive Ability

In education research and education policy, much attention is paid to schools, curricula, and teachers, but little attention is paid to the characteristics of students. Differences in general cognitive ability (g) are often overlooked as a source of important variance among schools and in outcomes among students within schools. Standardized test scores such as the SAT and ACT are reasonably good proxies for g and are available for most incoming college students. Though the idea of g being important in education is quite old, we present contemporary evidence that colleges and universities in the United States vary considerably in the average cognitive ability of their students, which correlates strongly with other methods (including international methods) of ranking colleges. We also show that these g differences are reflected in the extent to which graduates of colleges are represented in various high-status and high-income occupations. Finally, we show how including individual-level measures of cognitive ability can substantially increase the statistical power of experiments designed to measure educational treatment effects. We conclude that education policy researchers should give more consideration to the concept of individual differences in cognitive ability as well as other factors.

scholarly journals Spurious correlations in research on the effects of specific cognitive abilities

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kimmo Sorjonen ◽  
Bo Melin
Keyword(s):  
Cognitive Ability ◽  
Cognitive Abilities ◽  
Test Scores ◽  
Verbal Ability ◽  
Positive Association ◽  
Longitudinal Survey ◽  
The Other ◽  
General Cognitive Ability ◽  
Math Ability ◽  
Specific Cognitive Abilities

Studies on the effect of non-g ability residuals have often employed double adjustment for general cognitive ability (g), as they have calculated the ability residuals adjusting for g and then calculated the effect of the non-g residuals while adjusting for g. The present simulations demonstrate that the double adjustments may result in spurious negative associations between the non-g residual on one cognitive ability, e.g. verbal ability, and variables with a positive association with another ability, e.g. SAT math and math ability. In analyses of the 1997 National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY97), the negative associations between non-g residuals on verbal and math ability and aptitude test scores on the other ability vanished when not double adjusting for g. This indicates that the observed negative associations may be spurious and not due to differential investment of time and effort in one ability at the expense of the other ability, as suggested in the literature. Researchers of the effects of specific abilities are recommended to validate their findings and interpretations with analyses not double adjusting for g.

scholarly journals Individual differences in cortical processing speed predict cognitive abilities: a model-based cognitive neuroscience account

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anna-Lena Schubert ◽  
Michael D. Nunez ◽  
Dirk Hagemann ◽  
Joachim Vandekerckhove
Keyword(s):  
Individual Differences ◽  
Cognitive Ability ◽  
Processing Speed ◽  
Cognitive Abilities ◽  
Test Scores ◽  
Cognitive Modeling ◽  
Higher Order ◽  
Neural Processing ◽  
Ability Test ◽  
Evidence Accumulation

AbstractPrevious research has shown that individuals with greater cognitive abilities display a greater speed of higher-order cognitive processing. These results suggest that speeded neural information-processing may facilitate evidence accumulation during decision making and memory updating and thus yield advantages in general cognitive abilities. We used a hierarchical Bayesian cognitive modeling approach to test the hypothesis that individual differences in the velocity of evidence accumulation mediate the relationship between neural processing speed and cognitive abilities. We found that a higher neural speed predicted both the velocity of evidence accumulation across behavioral tasks as well as cognitive ability test scores. However, only a small part of the association between neural processing speed and cognitive abilities was mediated by individual differences in the velocity of evidence accumulation. The model demonstrated impressive forecasting abilities by predicting 36% of individual variation in cognitive ability test scores in an entirely new sample solely based on their electrophysiological and behavioral data. Our results suggest that individual differences in neural processing speed might affect a plethora of higher-order cognitive processes, that only in concert explain the large association between neural processing speed and cognitive abilities, instead of the effect being entirely explained by differences in evidence accumulation speeds.

scholarly journals Blood-based epigenome-wide analyses of cognitive abilities

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel L. McCartney ◽  
Robert F Hillary ◽  
Daniel Trejo-Banos ◽  
Danni Alisha Gadd ◽  
Rosie M Walker ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Dna Methylation ◽  
Individual Differences ◽  
Association Study ◽  
Cognitive Ability ◽  
Cognitive Functions ◽  
Cognitive Abilities ◽  
Variance Components ◽  
General Cognitive Ability ◽  
Variance Components Analysis ◽  
Components Analysis

We present a blood-based epigenome-wide association study and variance-components analysis of cognitive functions (n=9,162). Individual differences in DNA methylation (DNAm) accounted for up to 41.5% of the variance in cognitive functions; together, genetic and epigenetic markers accounted for up to 70.4% of the variance. A DNAm predictor accounted for 3.4% and 4.5% (P≤9.9x10-6) of the variance in general cognitive ability, independently of a polygenic score, in two external cohorts.

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