thinking, social integration, self-confidence, hardiness, responsibility, considerateness, social sensitivity, and toler-
ance. Furthermore, in some instances, response style scales themselves have been defined by their authors as
being proximally aligned with a personality trait. Paulhus (1998), for example, describes his Self-Deceptive
Enhancement scale as ‘closely related to narcissism’ (p. 9). Subsequently, he has also indicated that socially desir-
able response style scales may be differentially representative of the content dimensions of agency and commu-
nion ( Paulhus, 2002 ).
Second, response style scales empirically demonstrate associations with various content scales of personality.
In reviewing recent investigations of social desirability, Holden and Passey (2009) indicated that socially desirable
responding scales may assess both relevant content and confounding style and that distinguishing between these
interpretations is both theoretically and operationally challenging. Furthermore, in examining a number of differ-
ent socially desirable responding scales, Holden and Passey (2010) reported non-zero associations with personal-
ity dimensions of agreeableness and conscientiousness. These associations were maintained even when
personality was assessed through peer-report rather than self-report. Although the authors noted that the associa-
tions did not necessarily merit strong substantive interpretations (all correlations were less than .30), results
served to indicate that response style scales are not pure indicators of content-irrelevant, stylistic variance.
Third, the interpretation of response style scales can vary as a function of context, either naturally occurring or
experimentally induced ( Holden, 2007 ). Consider that, whereas respondents who are faking will score at the rela-
tive extremes on scales of socially desirable responding, individuals scoring at the extremes on a scale of socially
desirable responding are not necessarily faking. Further, the personality scale validity-moderating effect of
socially desirable responding has been shown by Holden (2007) to vary as a function of natural versus experi-
mentally prescribed dissimulation.
Thus, despite the relative psychometric merits of response bias scales for indicating invalid responding, such
scales are not perfectly reliable, pure indicators of distorted responding. As is the case with personality scales, the
interpretation of scores for response style scales should be undertaken with caution. This is especially true as long
as empirical evidence for the scales’ ability to identify individuals distorting their answers is either missing or weak.
OTHER METHODS TO DETECT OR PREVENT FAKING
Within the literature, attempts to prevent faking or social desirable responding are often differentiated by
either focusing on the test or the test taker ( Ziegler et al., 2012 ). Although attempts to warn test takers have
yielded mixed results, there are some promising new developments in trying to make personality questionnaires
less susceptible to faking. With regard to detecting faking and social desirable responding, statistical methods
such as decision trees, structural equation modeling or item response theory have been used. In the following,
we will first focus on attempts trying to prevent faking and later on detection.
CREATING TESTS LESS SUSCEPTIBLE TO SOCIALLY DESIRABLE RESPONDING
Attempts aimed at making a questionnaire less susceptible to faking and socially desirable responding usually
try to change the items themselves. For example, Ba¨ckstro ¨m, Bjo ¨rklund, and Larsson (2009) demonstrated that a
regular Big 5 questionnaire contains a general factor due to the evaluative content of the items. This content pro-
vokes social desirable responding. By rephrasing the items those authors substantially reduced the evaluativeness
of those items (see also Ba¨ckstro ¨m et al., 2012 ). As one consequence, the underlying general evaluative factor
more or less disappeared while internal consistency and validity evidence remained mostly unchanged.
However, it remains to be seen whether such items maintain their low evaluativeness in high stakes situations
such as employment applicant settings.
For quite some time, there have been efforts to use forced choice items to prevent faking and socially desirable
responding. In the most basic sense, forced choice items ask the test taker to choose between two alternative answers
the one most like her or him. Matching those alternatives according to their desirability should then yield answers
that go back to the trait only. Empirical findings have been mixed though ( Heggestad, Morrison, Reeve & McCloy
2006; Jackson, Wroblewski & Ashton 2000 ). Besides the mixed evidence for the lower susceptibility of these items
with regard to social desirability, there is, however, another issue detrimental for most assessment purposes /C0
forced choice items are ipsative. This means they yield scores that represent the relative level of a person’s trait36 2. RESPONSE BIAS, MALINGERING, AND IMPRESSION MANAGEMENT
I. INTRODUCTION: CORE ISSUES IN ASSESSMENT