The differences are even greater between respondents asked to portray themselves in an undesirable way and those asked to portray themselves honestly. Laboratory studies with transparent personality items-that is, items for which the supposedly good or bad response options are readily apparent- show that the mean scores for respondents asked to describe themselves in as good a way as possible are significantly higher than the mean scores for respondents asked to describe themselves as they really are (honest responses). Research clearly demonstrates that when asked to do so, people can distort their responses in the desired direction. Through the years, research has focused on four broad questions: (a) Can people distort self-descriptions of their personality? (b) Do applicants distort their self-descriptions? (c) What effect does intentional distortion have? (d) Are there remedies for intentional distortion? Can People Distort (Fake) Self-descriptions Of Their Personality? Indeed, interest and research in this issue are as keen and perhaps as controversial as ever. Although reviews of research on intentional distortion date back to 1946and much is now known, more knowledge has led to more questions. Interest in the subject of intentional distortion is probably as old as interest in measuring personality through self-report methods. This phenomenon of changes in responses to such items across motivated (e.g., applicant) and nonmotivated settings has been referred to as impression management, socially desirable responding, intentional distortion, and faking. Some individuals tend to respond to this item more toward the strongly agree end of the response scale in an applicant setting than when responding to the same item in a research setting or when taking the test for self-exploration. However, for many personality items it is possible for applicants to respond in a way that enhances their attractiveness to the hiring organization.įor illustrative purposes, consider the personality test item “I am rarely late for appointments” and an associated five-point Likert response scale that ranges from strongly disagree to strongly agree. The assumption is that applicants will respond to items in a manner consistent with their behavior, producing scores that indicate their trait standing. A potentially important issue with many personality tests, however, is the accuracy of responses provided by applicants.

Meta-analytic evidence suggests that scores from well-developed personality tests are predictive of job performance and other organizationally relevant outcomes, with the strongest findings observed across settings for the trait of conscientiousness.

Many companies use scores from personality tests when evaluating job applicants.

Positive impression management