The role of social desirability responding in the longitudinal relations between intention and behaviour

Abstract

Social desirability responding (SDR) is the tendency of respondents to answer survey questions in a manner that will be viewed favourably by others. Scholars in environmental psychology have argued SDR influences individuals’ answers to surveys asking their pro-environmental intentions, attitude and behaviour. Yet empirical evidence indicates the correlations between SDR and environmentalism questions are weak, which was confirmed by a unpublished meta-analysis reporting pooled correlations ranging from .06 to .11. We used data from the New Zealand Attitudes and Values Study (N = 6518) to examine possible subtle relations between two SDR items measuring self-deceptive enhancement and impression management with several environmental questions in a national sample. Cross-sectional and delayed correlations were weak, but autoregressive cross-lagged models showed a marginal interaction between the impression management item and self-reported behaviour in predicting change in pro-environmental intention one-year after. We discuss practical implications of the findings.