Socially desirable responding in personality assessment: Still more substance than style

doi:10.1016/j.paid.2008.02.012

Personality and Individual Differences

Volume 45, Issue 1, July 2008, Pages 22-27

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.paid.2008.02.012 Get rights and content

Abstract

Moderated multiple regression analyses were employed to test the validity of the Marlowe–Crowne Social Desirability (MCSD) as an indicator of inaccuracy in self ratings of personality. Self ratings on the NEO Five Factor Inventory (NEO-FFI) and the MCSD were collected from 222 college students. Informant ratings using the NEO-FFI were gathered from 128 randomly assigned roommates and 183 biological parents of these students. MCSD scores were not associated with lower agreement between self ratings and informant ratings in any of the 15 moderator tests conducted. MCSD scores were positively correlated with extraversion, agreeableness, and conscientiousness as rated by the self, roommate, and parent. Higher MCSD scores are not indicative of lower validity of self ratings. Alternative interpretations of the MCSD are discussed.

Introduction

Socially desirable responding (SDR) has been a topic of interest in personality theory and assessment for several decades (Block, 1965, Crowne and Marlowe, 1960, Edwards, 1957, Hogan and Nicholson, 1988, Paulhus, 2002, Wiggins, 1973). SDR is typically defined as a style of responding to questionnaire items that results in an inaccurate self assessment due to some combination of minimizing negative qualities by denial of common faults and maximizing positive qualities by endorsement of uncommon virtues. The attempt to control for SDR in the development of personality questionnaires (e.g., Jackson, 1970) or correct scores based on separate indications of SDR (e.g., Butcher, Dahlstrom, Graham, Tellegen, & Kaemmer, 1989) is implicitly based on the notion that SDR operates as a suppressor variable. That is, the variance shared between scores from personality tests and measures of SDR is spurious variance that is uncorrelated with external criteria of interest, such as observed behavior or perceptions of those traits by others. Thus, the SDR hypothesis proposes that measures of SDR moderate the relationship between self-rated predictors and relevant criteria and that correcting for variance in SDR should enhance the predictive validity of self ratings of personality.

Other lines of research, however, have suggested that adjusting scores for social desirability does not significantly improve the validity of self ratings in a consistent manner (Dicken, 1963, Hough et al., 1990, McCrae and Costa, 1983). Dicken (1963), for example, investigated the possible role of social desirability as a suppressor variable in the California Psychological Inventory (CPI) using two separate samples of research participants. Participants in both samples completed the CPI, which measured personality traits such as dominance, responsibility, and impulsivity. In addition, external raters scored the participants on the same eight personality traits. Data from both samples revealed that correcting self ratings of personality for SDR using Dicken’s CPI-generated scale of social desirability resulted in no substantial gain in validity. Dicken concluded that “the expectation that correcting personality scores for individual differences in desirability responding will increase is not fulfilled” (Dicken, 1963, p. 712).

Similarly, McCrae and Costa (1983) explored the validity of the NEO Personality Inventory to examine the impact of SDR on self ratings of neuroticism, extraversion, and openness to experience. McCrae and Costa used the external criterion of spouse ratings on the NEO and two measures of social desirability, the Marlowe–Crowne Social Desirability (MCSD; Crowne & Marlowe, 1960) scale and the Lie scale from Form A of the Eysenck Personality Inventory (EPI; Eysenck & Eysenck, 1964). The results indicated decreased correlations between self and spouse personality ratings when self ratings were adjusted for SDR as compared to the uncorrected correlations between the two ratings. Furthermore, the pattern of correlations between SDR measures and spouse ratings was similar to that between SDR measures and self ratings. Higher scores on SDR measures were associated with spouse reports of higher extraversion and lower neuroticism. McCrae and Costa (1983) interpreted these findings as evidence that social desirability scales reflect substantive content to a greater degree than response style tendencies. However, this study examined only three of the five factors in the five factor model (FFM) that is so widely accepted at present. Furnham (1997) showed that the two remaining traits (agreeableness and conscientiousness) were most susceptible to the effects of intentional distortion in terms of SDR. Thus, conscientiousness and agreeableness warrant further investigation in terms of their relation to socially desirable response strategies.

Piedmont, McCrae, Riemann, and Angleitner (2000) examined the potential moderating role of SDR measures in questionnaire self ratings of all five FFM traits. Piedmont et al. (2000) obtained self ratings on two personality measures, the NEO-PI-R (Costa & McCrae, 1992) and the Multidimensional Personality Questionnaire (MPQ; Tellegen, 1982), from more than 800 German twin pairs. Each twin was assigned to a separate subsample and asked to select two peers who completed the NEO-FFI (Costa & McCrae, 1992), an abbreviated version of the NEO-PI-R, rating the personality of the target. Similar to McCrae and Costa (1983), the results showed that NEO-PI-R scores, corrected for SDR, rarely showed higher correlations with relevant MPQ scores than uncorrected NEO-PI-R scores across both subsamples. However, the measure of SDR used in this study, the Positive Presentation Management scale (Schinka, Kinder, & Kremer, 1997), was derived from existing items in the NEO-PI-R. Because this response style scale was constructed using items originally created to measure substantive personality traits, it may fail to discriminate between substantive versus stylistic variance in self ratings. Accordingly, Paulhus (2002) advocates using scales with items that were specifically created to measure SDR in order to make valid inferences about SDR.

The use of self-selected informants may be another problem with the existing research on the validity of SDR measures. The integrity of the findings presented by McCrae and Costa (1983) is founded on the assumption that marital partners do not share the same biases. The other relevant studies (e.g., Dicken, 1963, Piedmont et al., 2000) utilize informants who are selected by the target to provide ratings of his or her personality traits. Given that spouse selection is not a random pairing process, married couples may share specific biases, such as SDR, when judging the personality of their mates. For example, the success of a marital relationship may depend on shared distortions in perceptions of a partner’s self image. Research suggests that a high quality marital relationship may limit the degree to which each partner can act as an objective rater of the other (Sillars and Scott, 1983, Stiff et al., 1992). Thus, a more stringent test of the validity of SDR measures might use ratings from informants who are not specifically selected by the target to provide ratings of his or her personality. In all of the previous research cited here, the informants serving as the unbiased external criterion were not randomly assigned. Therefore, the assumption of unbiased ratings remains uncertain.

The present study will integrate several elements not addressed in previous research while examining the moderating effects of SDR on the strength of the correlations observed between self ratings and informant ratings of FFM personality traits. Two distinctive types of informants will provide external criteria to validate the self ratings, specifically, randomly assigned college roommates and biological parents. It is proposed that the two types of informants have different levels of motivation to present the target as socially desirable. The parents are somewhat analogous to the spouses and self-selected peers used in previous research in that parents are well acquainted with and knowledgeable about the target but potentially motivated to uphold the target’s positively distorted self image. The randomly paired roommates, in contrast, reflect a unique relationship. Randomly paired roommates are knowledgeable about the target, but they are not selected by or related to the target. Thus, by including two types of external observers, the current study compares ratings by informants who may differ in their motivation to present the target as socially desirable. Furthermore, assessment of all five FFM personality traits will be included to evaluate a wide range of potential substantive correlates of MCSD scores.

Section snippets

Participants

The participants in this study were 222 normal age college freshmen (75% female) drawn from a larger research project on informant personality assessment. One hundred twenty-eight participants in this larger sample were accompanied by their roommates to the laboratory. Target participants volunteered for the study to fulfill research requirements for an introductory psychology course. Roommate raters were offered either $10.00 or research credit if they were also enrolled in the introductory

Results

Table 1 presents the zero-order correlations between the MCSD and the five NEO-FFI scores by self rating, roommate rating, and parent rating. Higher correlations were observed with self ratings than with either set of informant ratings for four of the five scales. Openness scores from all three raters were uncorrelated with the MCSD.

A series of moderated multiple regression analyses were performed to determine if MCSD scores were associated with the level of correlation between self ratings and

Discussion

The present study evaluated the validity of the MCSD as an indicator of inaccurate self ratings of personality. The results presented here show that scores on the MCSD did not moderate the strength of self-other correlations for any of the five FFM traits. Semipartial correlations showed lower levels of agreement between self ratings and ratings from two types of informants. This pattern of results was consistent regardless of whether parent ratings or roommate ratings were used as criteria. In

Acknowledgments

This study was funded in part by a Research Support Grant from Villanova University. We are grateful to Psychological Assessment Resources, Inc. for granting permission to construct and use an informant version of the NEO-FFI. We also thank Christine Martino and Elizabeth Hall for their assistance with data collection and project administration.

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Socially desirable responding in personality assessment: Still more substance than style

Abstract

Introduction

Section snippets

Participants

Results

Discussion

Acknowledgments

The challenge of response sets

Minnesota multiphasic personality inventory (MMPI-2): Manual for administration and scoring

Revised NEO personality inventory: Professional manual

A new scale of social desirability independent of psychopathology

Journal of Consulting Psychology

Good impression, social desirability, and acquiescence as suppressor variables

Educational and Psychological Measurement

The social desirability variable in personality assessment and research

Manual of the Eysenck personality inventory

Knowing and faking one’s five factor personality score

Journal of Personality Assessment

The meaning of personality test scores

American Psychologist

Criterion-related validities of personality constructs and the effect of response distortion on those validities

Journal of Applied Psychology

A sequential system for personality scale development