Accounting for Socially Desirable Responding in Personality Assessment

2018 ◽  
pp. 535-546
Author(s):  
Joyce H. L. Lui ◽  
Christopher T. Barry ◽  
Katrina H. McDougall
Keyword(s):  
Personality Assessment ◽  
Socially Desirable Responding

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.

Effects of Social Desirability Scores on Hiring Judgments

2010 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 27-39 ◽  
Author(s):  
Neil D. Christiansen ◽  
Renee F. Rozek ◽  
Gary Burns
Keyword(s):  
Social Desirability ◽  
Personality Assessment ◽  
Personality Test ◽  
Cognitive Tests ◽  
Test Results ◽  
Hiring Decisions ◽  
Socially Desirable Responding ◽  
Personality Tests ◽  
Managerial Position ◽  
Selection And Assessment

Practitioners (N = 160) working in the area of selection and assessment read descriptions of a managerial position and the assessment profiles of two hypothetical candidates who were finalists for the job. Embedded in the profiles were scores on a battery of cognitive and personality tests that included information on socially desirable responding such that there were no social desirability (SD) scores provided, differing SD scores, or elevated SD scores for both candidates. Ratings indicated that elevated SD scores were used as personality information to infer that candidates were less candid and sincere individuals. Candidates with elevated SD scores were judged to be less hirable, and less weight was given to the personality assessment. Despite this, even when SD scores were elevated, personality test results had more influence on hiring judgments than scores on the cognitive tests. Implications are discussed in the context of research that had failed to show SD scores are useful for facilitating hiring decisions or adjusting trait scores.

Handwriting Analysis and Personality Assessment

2000 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 44-51 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Greasley
Keyword(s):  
Personality Traits ◽  
Personality Assessment ◽  
Personnel Selection ◽  
Empirical Studies ◽  
Handwriting Analysis ◽  
Recruitment Process ◽  
Academic Literature ◽  
Personnel Recruitment ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Better Than

It has been estimated that graphology is used by over 80% of European companies as part of their personnel recruitment process. And yet, after over three decades of research into the validity of graphology as a means of assessing personality, we are left with a legacy of equivocal results. For every experiment that has provided evidence to show that graphologists are able to identify personality traits from features of handwriting, there are just as many to show that, under rigorously controlled conditions, graphologists perform no better than chance expectations. In light of this confusion, this paper takes a different approach to the subject by focusing on the rationale and modus operandi of graphology. When we take a closer look at the academic literature, we note that there is no discussion of the actual rules by which graphologists make their assessments of personality from handwriting samples. Examination of these rules reveals a practice founded upon analogy, symbolism, and metaphor in the absence of empirical studies that have established the associations between particular features of handwriting and personality traits proposed by graphologists. These rules guide both popular graphology and that practiced by professional graphologists in personnel selection.

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.

Structuring Assessments of Psychopathology

2006 ◽  
Vol 27 (2) ◽  
pp. 87-92 ◽  
Author(s):  
Willem K.B. Hofstee ◽  
Dick P.H. Barelds ◽  
Jos M.F. Ten Berge
Keyword(s):  
Principal Components ◽  
Personality Assessment ◽  
Clinical Sample ◽  
Principal Component ◽  
Normal Sample ◽  
Normative Sample ◽  
Assessment Data ◽  
Obsessive Compulsive ◽  
Oblique Rotation ◽  
Two Samples

Hofstee and Ten Berge (2004a) have proposed a new look at personality assessment data, based on a bipolar proportional (-1, .. . 0, .. . +1) scale, a corresponding coefficient of raw-scores likeness L = ΢XY/N, and raw-scores principal component analysis. In a normal sample, the approach resulted in a structure dominated by a first principal component, according to which most people are faintly to mildly socially desirable. We hypothesized that a more differentiated structure would arise in a clinical sample. We analyzed the scores of 775 psychiatric clients on the 132 items of the Dutch Personality Questionnaire (NPV). In comparison to a normative sample (N = 3140), the eigenvalue for the first principal component appeared to be 1.7 times as small, indicating that such clients have less personality (social desirability) in common. Still, the match between the structures in the two samples was excellent after oblique rotation of the loadings. We applied the abridged m-dimensional circumplex design, by which persons are typed by their two highest scores on the principal components, to the scores on the first four principal components. We identified five types: Indignant (1-), Resilient (1-2+), Nervous (1-2-), Obsessive-Compulsive (1-3-), and Introverted (1-4-), covering 40% of the psychiatric sample. Some 26% of the individuals had negligible scores on all type vectors. We discuss the potential and the limitations of our approach in a clinical context.

The Moving-IAT

2017 ◽  
Vol 33 (6) ◽  
pp. 445-452
Author(s):  
Monika Fleischhauer
Keyword(s):  
Internal Consistency ◽  
Personality Assessment ◽  
Block Structure ◽  
Mental Representations ◽  
Indirect Measures ◽  
Attitude Research ◽  
Self Reports ◽  
Implicit Personality ◽  
Single Block ◽  
Psychometric Quality

Abstract. Accumulated evidence suggests that indirect measures such as the Implicit Association Test (IAT) provide an increment in personality assessment explaining behavioral variance over and above self-reports. Likewise, it has been shown that there are several unwanted sources of variance in personality IATs potentially reducing their psychometric quality. For example, there is evidence that individuals use imagery-based facilitation strategies while performing the IAT. That is, individuals actively create mental representations of their person that fit to the category combination in the respective block, but do not necessarily fit to their implicit personality self-concept. A single-block IAT variant proposed by attitude research, where compatible and incompatible trials are presented in one and the same block, may prevent individuals from using such facilitation strategies. Consequently, for the trait need for cognition (NFC), a new single-block IAT version was developed (called Moving-IAT) and tested against the standard IAT for differences in internal consistency and predictive validity in a sample of 126 participants. Although the Moving-IAT showed lower internal consistency, its predictive value for NFC-typical behavior was higher than that of the standard IAT. Given individual’s strategy reports, the single-block structure of the Moving-IAT indeed reduces the likelihood of imagery-based strategies.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document