Response Distortion in Personality Measurement: A Special Issue for Industrial, Work and Organizational Psychology

This collection, published as Volume 48, Issue 3 (2006), gathers research on a problem that has followed personality testing for as long as the tests have been used at work: people do not always answer truthfully. When a job is on the line, respondents may tilt their answers toward whatever they think will help them get hired. The guest editors, Jürgen Deller, Deniz S. Ones, Chockalingam Viswesvaran, and Stephan Dilchert, pulled together studies that look at how much this matters, why it happens, and what it does to the numbers.

Stephan Dilchert, Deniz S. Ones, Chockalingam Viswesvaran, and Jürgen Deller open with a question that doubles as a provocation: if people are, in a sense, built to deceive, can their self-reports still be trusted? Their piece sets up the tension that runs through the rest of the issue, namely whether faking ruins personality measurement or merely dents it.

Bernd Marcus takes on the practical side, examining how faking relates to validity and to the decision criteria used in personnel selection. The concern is not abstract. If scores shift because applicants manage their image, the rules a company uses to pick candidates may be resting on distorted data.

Michael S. Henry and Nambury S. Raju look at impression management from two angles: the kind that is a stable trait and the kind that flares up in particular situations. Their empirical analysis asks what each type does to a personality test. Along similar lines, Lauren J. Ramsay, Neal Schmitt, Frederick L. Oswald, Brian H. Kim, and Michael A. Gillespie study how the context an item is embedded in changes the way people answer biodata and situational judgment questions.

Rose A. Mueller-Hanson, Eric D. Heggestad, and George C. Thornton III dig into the psychology underneath faking, treating impression management as a window onto individual differences rather than just noise to be scrubbed out. Kevin M. Bradley and Neil M. A. Hauenstein approach the measurement question differently, showing how the type of sample studied can moderate what faking appears to do to the correlations between scales and to the factor structure itself.

Social desirability gets its own treatment from Jessica Mesmer-Magnus, Chockalingam Viswesvaran, Satish Deshpande, and Jacob Joseph, who tie it to over-claiming, self-esteem, and emotional intelligence. Hannah L. Jackson, Deniz S. Ones, and Handan Kepir Sinangil report a finding that cuts against easy assumptions: impression management did not predict how well expatriates adjusted or performed on the job, placing it, as their title puts it, neither here nor there.

Two closing studies push into mechanism and method. Cornelius J. König, Klaus G. Melchers, Martin Kleinmann, Gerald M. Richter, and Ute-Christine Klehe test whether being able to spot what a test is evaluating connects to integrity test scores. Lale Khorramdel and Klaus D. Kubinger run an experiment on actual job applicants to see how time pressure, or speediness, affects the way people fill out personality questionnaires.

Published by Pabst Science Publishers (Lengerich, Berlin, Bremen, Miami, Riga, Viernheim, Wien, Zagreb), the issue reads less like a verdict on faking than a map of where the arguments sit, with the editors' preface and acknowledgements framing the work that follows.