Social desirability: the role of over-claiming, self-esteem, and emotional intelligence

Abstract Socially desirable responding (SDR) has been widely studied with regards to personality assessment due to fears it may attenuate the predictive validity of decisions made using such assessments (e.g., in personnel selection). A number of scales have been employed to assess individual differences in response distortion. We expand the nomological net for a popular measure of social desirability - the Marlowe-Crowne scale - by correlating individual differences in SDR to measures of over-claiming, self-esteem, and emotional intelligence. Survey results (n = 198) yielded a significant positive correlation between SDR and both self-esteem and emotional intelligence. Over-claiming was found to be negatively related to self-deceptive enhancement, a form of SDR, but not to SDR overall. Regression analyses revealed emotional intelligence explains significant variance in SDR, over and above that which is explained by self-esteem and over-claiming alone (ΔR^sup 2^= .16, p Key words: social desirability response distortion, marlowe-crowne, self-deceptive denial, self-deceptive enhancement The use of personality variables to explain individual behavior has increased in the 1990s (Hough & Ones, 2001). Personality variables are increasingly employed to predict outcomes in high-stakes situations such as personnel selection in organizations (Barrick & Mount, 1991; Hurtz & Donovan, 2000; Salgado, 1997; Tett, Rothstein, & Jackson, 1991). This increased use is probably due to the meta-analytic findings suggesting that personality variables have considerable validity and utility for prediction of behavior across a variety of contexts (cf. Murphy & Dzieweczynski, 2005; Ones, Viswesvaran, & Dilchert, 2005). Nevertheless, the potential for test-takers to fake their responses (in order to garner a valued outcome; e.g., a job offer) to a personality test through socially desirable responding (SDR) have led some to question the construct and criterion-related validity of such tests. Research exploring SDR suggests there may be individual differences in this form of response distortion (e.g., Ones, Viswesvaran, & Reiss, 1996). The purpose of this study is to expand our understanding of the role of individual differences in SDR by expanding the nomological net surrounding a widely used measure of social desirability. In the next sections, we review (1) some major issues associated with SDR for personality and high-stakes testing, (2) the content domain of social desirability, and (3) the potential role of individual difference variables, self-esteem, over-claiming tendency, and emotional intelligence, to predict SDR. Major issues associated with socially desirable responding in high-stakes testing Substantial evidence suggests that personality variables correlate with a number of performance measures of importance to organizations (e.g., job performance, training performance, absenteeism, organizational commitment, etc.; Barrick & Mount, 1991; Ones, Viswesvaran, & Schmidt, 1993; Tett et al., 1991). In addition, personality variables have been found to correlate with several important life outcomes such as occupational status, health outcomes and healthy lifestyle behaviors, managerial ability, and leadership effectiveness. As such, the assessment of personality has become a central and important function for psychologists. Assessments of personality in high-stakes situations (both for the individual assessed and other stakeholders) have raised concerns about motivations for socially desirable responding and whether such socially desirable responding affects the decisions made on the basis of these scores (Mueller-Hanson, Heggstad, & Thornton, 2003). Broadly defined, socially desirable responding constitutes attempts by test-takers to answer test items in such a way as to obtain more desirable scores (whether better or worse) than would be achieved through honest responding (Paulhus, 1981; Viswesvaran & Ones, 1999). …