Social Desirability Estimation and "Faking Good" Well

Abstract

THE apparently widespread tendency of subjects to put their best foot forward when responding to items from personality and adjustment inventories has remained largely unanalyzed in the wake of recent efforts to detect, discourage or bemoan such behavior (Hanley, 1957 ; Voas, 1958 ; Edwards, 1957). Variations in the apparent strength of this tendency under different circumstances of assessment suggest that the phenomenon is in part a situational one. Even within a single assessment context, however, considerable individual differences in this tendency may be observed, suggesting, among other things, a person-situation interaction which reflects motivational characteristics of the subjects. Moreover, there is some evidence which suggests that when subjects are explicitly told to make a good impression, those who do dbestd are likely to be more psychologically sound than those who do less well at this task (Grayson and Olinger, 1957; Canter, 1963). The recent revival of interest in drole-playingd studies has produced a considerable amount of data which supports the observation that even under instructions designed to induce a uniformly high degree of good impression motivation, subjects will vary extensively in their performance (Wiggins, 1959; Walker, 1961; 1962). The present study was designed to test a hypothesis concerning one possible source of these observed individual differences. Whether dpsyching outd a potential employer or cooperating with the explicit instructions of a role-playing experiment, making a