Rethinking Social Desirability Scales

Abstract

Social desirability (specifically, impression management) scales are widely used by researchers and practitioners to screen individuals who bias self-reports in a self-favoring manner. These scales also serve to identify individuals at risk for psychological and health problems. The present review explores the evidence with regard to the ability of these scales to achieve these objectives. In the first part of the review, I present six criteria to evaluate impression management scales and conclude that they are unsatisfactory as measures of response style. Next, I explore what individual differences in impression management scores actually do measure. I compare two approaches: a defensiveness approach, which argues that these scales measure defensiveness that stems from vulnerable self-esteem, and an adjustment approach, which suggests that impression management is associated with personal well-being and interpersonal adjustment. Data from a wide variety of fields including social behavior, affect and wellbeing, health, and job performance tend to favor the adjustment approach. Finally, I argue that scales measuring impression management should be redefined as measures of interpersonally oriented self-control that identify individuals who demonstrate high levels of self-control, especially in social contexts.

The South African Personality Inventory (SAPI): A culture-informed instrument for the country’s main ethnocultural groups.

“…Our findings on social desirability suggest that it is useful to maintain a distinction between impression-management-focused aspects (Uziel, 2010) and lying aspects (as in the EPQ Lie scale). The former are likely to be broadly associated with personality (except Extraversion) in different cultural groups, whereas the latter may have a more circumscribed effect that is more in line with the view of social desirability as response distortion.…”

“…In a study focusing only on the social-relational SAPI concepts, we found them to be more strongly related to impression management than to lying (lying was in fact positively related to the negative social-relational concepts in a multiple regression analysis; Valchev et al, 2014). The lying aspects of social desirability can be viewed as a purposeful distortion of responses; the impressionmanagement aspects can be viewed as a personality characteristic of effortful selfregulation in an interpersonal context (Uziel, 2010). We examine the associations of all SAPI factors with both types of social desirability.…”

The Balanced Inventory of Desirable Responding Short Form (BIDR-16)

“…The ubiquitous problem of SDR has led to a scale proliferation (Paulhus, 1991;Uziel, 2010). The scale most commonly used in the past 60 years is the Marlowe-Crowne Social Desirability Scale (MCSDS; Beretvas, Meyers, & Leite, 2002;Crowne & Marlowe, 1964).…”

Incremental validity of positive orientation: predictive efficiency beyond the five-factor model

“…However, according to abundant empirical evidence (Chen, Watson, Biderman, & Ghorbani, 2016;McCrae & Costa, 1986;Uziel, 2010), self-reports of personality traits should not be perceived by design as contaminated with the need of social approval (e.g. because in many studies self-reports satisfactorily correlate with the ratings of others).…”