Do Attempts to Improve Respondent Attention Increase Social Desirability Bias?

Abstract

In this research note, we investigate the effectiveness of warnings as a method for increasing respondent motivation and decreasing survey satisficing. Four different styles of warning messages are examined in data from a randomized survey experiment conducted on the Internet. The analysis shows that three of the four warnings significantly improve respondent engagement. There is some evidence, however, that warning messages increase socially desirable responding (SDR) for certain types of people. We conclude that warnings can be a useful method for increasing attention, but that researchers should first establish that these protocol do not have unintended consequences, either for the entire sample or for theoretically relevant subgroups.