--- title: "Social desirability bias" description: "Social desirability bias is the tendency of respondents to answer questionnaires in the way they believe will be viewed favourably rather than accurately. It inflates scores on desirable traits, compresses the differences between people, and is strongest exactly when something depends on the answer — such as a job application." canonical: https://www.assessall.com/guides/glossary/s/social-desirability-bias updated: 2026-09-23 source: AssessAll --- # Social desirability bias _Also known as: Faking good, Impression management._ Social desirability bias is the tendency of respondents to answer questionnaires in the way they believe will be viewed favourably rather than accurately. It inflates scores on desirable traits, compresses the differences between people, and is strongest exactly when something depends on the answer — such as a job application. ## Why it is worse in selection than in development The same questionnaire behaves differently in the two settings. A person completing a personality inventory for their own development has little reason to distort; a person completing it as the last step before an offer has every reason to. This is one of the strongest arguments against carrying a development instrument straight into a selection process without re-examining it. The norms, and often the item behaviour, were established in the low-stakes condition. ## What actually reduces it Forced-choice formats, where the respondent picks between equally desirable statements, reduce the room to inflate everything at once, at the cost of a more complex scoring model. Validity scales — items almost nobody can truthfully endorse, and pairs of items that ought to be answered consistently — detect it rather than prevent it. Warning candidates that response patterns are checked has a measurable dampening effect and is also the honest thing to do. What does not work is assuming that an anonymous-feeling interface removes the incentive; the incentive is the job. ## How big is it, actually — and the finding that should stop you buying a faking correction Two meta-analyses answer two different halves of this question, and read together they point somewhere most vendors would rather they did not. The distortion is real, it is trait-specific, and it is not small. Birkeland, Manson and colleagues pooled 33 studies comparing job applicants with non-applicants on personality measures (International Journal of Selection and Assessment, 2006) and found the applicant–non-applicant difference concentrated in exactly two of the Big Five: conscientiousness d = .45 and emotional stability d = .44, against extraversion d = .11 and openness d = .13. Applicants are not inflating everything; they are inflating the dimensions they believe the job is asking about — which is why the ranking shifts by role, and why direct Big Five measures showed substantially larger differences than indirect ones. And correcting for it does not buy you a better prediction. Ones, Viswesvaran and Reiss meta-analysed the social-desirability literature in the Journal of Applied Psychology 81(6), 660–679 (1996), under the title "The red herring". Their conclusion, quoted from the abstract: social desirability scales "were found not to predict school success, task performance, counterproductive behaviors, and job performance"; social desirability "is in fact related to real individual differences in emotional stability and conscientiousness"; and "removing the effects of social desirability from the Big Five dimensions of personality leaves the criterion-related validity of personality constructs for predicting job performance intact." Those two results are only paradoxical if you assume the desirability score is pure noise. Part of what a desirability scale picks up is a genuine disposition, so subtracting it removes signal along with distortion — which is how a correction can be statistically impressive and predictively worthless at the same time. The practical rule: a validity scale is a reason to read a report more carefully, not a coefficient to subtract from someone's score. A vendor selling a faking correction that raises predictive validity should be asked to show that specific result on that specific instrument, because the meta-analytic default is that it does not. --- Source: https://www.assessall.com/guides/glossary/s/social-desirability-bias