such items would clearly be lying. But test takers are not literalists; they
are likely to say to themselves, “Surely these psychologists didn’t meanto ask if I actually study the voting records of every single political can -
didate, from President to dogcatcher. No one does, so that would be a
stupid question to ask. What they must have meant to ask was whetherI am a concerned citizen who takes voting seriously . Since I am and Ido, I guess I should answer yes.”
Rational analyses of what subjects might be thinking when they re -
spond will not suffice here; the only way to find out if validity scales
succeed in identifying and correcting self-report biases is by empiricaltest. We can compare corrected and uncorrected self-reports with animpartial, external standard—say , observer ratings—to see whether cor -
recting improves accuracy of self-reports. Several studies (Dicken, 1963;
McCrae & Costa, 1983c; McCrae, Costa, Dahlstrom, et al., 1989;Piedmont, McCrae, Riemann, & Angleitner, 2000) convincingly showthat the use of validity scales does nothing to improve the accuracy ofself-reports in volunteer samples—indeed, it often impairs them. Mostpeople apparently answer honestly , without any significant attempt tomake themselves look good. It is possible that there is more defensive-ness or socially desirable responding under other conditions, for exam-ple, when applying for a job (but see Ones, Viswesvaran, & Reiss, 1996,for a different view). But that possibility need not concern us here. Thestudies of personality and age that we examine all use volunteer sub-jects with no motivation to fake their scores, and we are justified inputting considerable faith in these self-reports as one line of evidence.
A QUESTIONNAIRE MEASURE:
THE NEO PERSONALITY INVENTORY
Any of the instruments in Table 4 might be suitable for the study of ag -
ing and personality . In fact, however, most of our research has used
some version of the NEO Personality Inventory , or NEO-PI (Costa &McCrae, 1985, 1989a), and a more detailed description of that instru -
ment may give a better sense of the process of measurement and the
meaning of the major dimensions of personality .
The Revised NEO-PI, or NEO-PI-R (Costa & McCrae, 1992a),
consists of 240 items, phrased either in the first person for self-reports(e.g., “I really like most people I meet”) or in the third person for ob -Measuring Personality 45