Faking on Personality Tests

Faking on personality tests sounds like quite the strong language, right? To call someone a faker is considered not only a moral judgement but also requires proof. Maybe we need to clarify what faking on personality tests actually means. Why faking on personality tests is even worth discussing? What personality characteristics might predispose people to fake a personality test? And eventually how to mitigate it? This blog attempts at answering these questions in a simpler, non-academic language. Fasten the seatbelts, the ride starts now.

First lap - let us define what we mean by faking on personality tests. The best way to do this is to distinguish faking from two other terms which psychologists use when they talk about distortion in what we report about ourselves - impression management and social desirability.

Levashina and Campion (2006) argued that faking might be better understood as a special case of impression management. Sometimes obfuscating what we report is not malignant, such as when someone has almost finished a degree and is due to graduate within a month. If that person reported to have finished the degree in their resume, then they are impression managing. However, if the person reported to have a GPA of 4.00 when it was 3.00, this person is faking.

Whereas faking is conscious and motivated by a specific goal social desirability is an unconscious motive that is common among all individuals. It is characterized by responding positively to personality statements related to self-evaluation with the aim of making oneself feel better (Meehl & Hathaway, 1946). Moreover, social desirability might even be a legitimate personality concept described by higher Conscientiousness, higher Agreeableness, and lower Neuroticism (Costa & McCrae, 1985; Digman, 1997). We like to say to others (and they like to hear it too) that we are hard-working, considerate, and emotionally resilient, right? Another long-proposed hypothesis is that social desirability might in effect measure a sort of social na?veté (Eysenck & Eysenck, 1971). To reuse our example from above – imagine the person who claimed to already hold their degree, uses the resume to apply for a job and goes to an interview. They are asked if they are considerate to other people and answer yes because they perceive themselves as a good person even though other people might not be so sure about that. Our fictitious character clearly needs to practice more self-awareness and feedback-seeking, but they are not faking.

Second lap – why faking is not benign. ?Let’s first pass the nay-sayers. Johnson and Hogan (2006) provided a widely referenced argument why faking is of no significance for your personality and your test scores. Hogan’s socioanalytic theory assumes that deception and faking are natural components of competitive behavior (getting ahead) in society. Taking a personality test, metaphorically speaking, is riding the vehicle of self-presentation (Hogan, 1991) to get ahead in life. If one knows that their future employer likes reliable and intelligent people, overreporting Conscientiousness and Openness to Experience is a natural mechanism for making oneself liked by their employer and showing the employer, as if making a pledge to oneself, that this is the personal image one wants to consistently present at work.

Johnson and Hogan (2006) believe that faking is not malignant, but just another form of interacting socially, and the responses to the test items communicate our social agendas. However, they do not bring up the critical issue of not living up to what we claimed to be on the personality test. Smart and motivated people are perhaps the biggest challenge for Hogan’s mild view on faking because they will beat the personality test, convey a very positive reputation until hired, and then display the negative behaviors they disguised (i.e., lied about). Such people’s lack of fit and opportunism might wreak havoc at their workplaces, and on the top of that, if they continue to fake desirable reputations for specific occasions (e.g., performance reviews, building coalitions against coworkers, gossiping, scapegoating), they might get away with it (Tett & Simonet, 2011). At such point, faking is consequential, but it is “too late” because faking has decreased the usefulness of the personality tests in the hiring procedures.

The last sentence about the hiring procedures is crucial to completely understand. Let us use an example to discuss it. Let us say that you wanted to hire 100 really extroverted salespeople – they will be working in a very busy mall where very bored people go to chat and waste away their time. Ten introverted candidates faked on the test – they like the mall and the job very much. You went against all good pre-employment testing practices which recommend that you must conduct interviews with your candidates to establish, among other facts, if they are truly so extraverted as the test showed. By you hiring these 10 fakers (sounds harsh, right?) you distorted the rank ordering of the applicants’ scores and instead of hiring 10 more truly extraverted salespeople you left them without the opportunity to contribute to your emerging mall empire. And what happens when the 10 salespeople you hired fail selling the amounts you have planned for them to sell? You lost time and resources training them for the job, you lost profit from customers who did not get their chatty experience, and now you need to restart the hiring process and again lose time and resources. Faking does have consequences when we use the personality test scores as the sole source of decision-making.

If you are not yet convinced, let me cite some notable studies to support the last claim. Simulation studies indicate that even when 5% of the test-takers slightly fake, 15% of these fakers obtained the top score for the scale they were faking, and when 25% of the participants fake, 63% obtain the top score (Zickar et al., 1996). Also, Douglas, et al. (1996) found that when the percentage of faking applicants increased from 0 to 25, the number of fakers within the top ten ranked applicants rose from 0 to 9. Rosse et al.’s (1998) study with actual job candidates and incumbents, found 29% of applicants had scores 2 standard deviations (i.e., above the 96th percentile) higher than the mean of incumbents, and 13% of applicants were 3 standard deviations (i.e., above the 99th percentile) higher. Finally, in Griffith et al.’s (2007) study a month after the participants took a customer service conscientiousness scale as applicants, they returned and took the test again, but in both honest and fake good conditions. The authors examined the proportion of applicants who would not have been hired if their honest scores were used instead of their original applicant scores in a top-down fashion. A 50% selection ratio (i.e., the number of hired candidates compared to the total number of candidates) yielded 31% of hired applicants being fakers, whereas at a 10% selection ratio 66% faked their way to the top. Convinced?

Third lap – when do people fake. Simply put – 1) when they can (ability), 2) when they want/need (motivation), 3) when the circumstances (test-taking environment) allow them, and 4) when the test format (questions and response scales) is not sophisticated. Let’s quickly go through these four. Regarding ability, numerous studies have found that highly cognitively able individuals are able to figure out the traits which test questions measure (Bing et al., 2004; Christiansen et al., 2005; Furnham, 1986; Huang et al., 2015;

Levashina et al., 2009; Nguyen et al., 2005). Also, the knowledge what the test measures might come from actual job experience. Imagine an experienced accountant taking a personality test for an accounting job. Do you think this applicant will know which questions are good to endorse to present themselves as a good accountant? I ensure you that the question I like organizing my desk and documents will be strongly endorsed. Regarding motivation, individuals would engage in faking WHEN they believe that faking is critical for securing high scores on a personality test IN ORDER TO get a very desirable result that would bring them the most personal satisfaction (e.g., a job and salary, prestige, etc.) AND IF they are confident in their ability to successfully increase their scores on the personality test (McFarland & Ryan, 2006). One caveat – if the test-taker is naturally high on the personality traits to be faked, no faking (i.e., motivation for faking) will be needed – the test-taker will be just answering honestly. Regarding the environment, simply put, when personality tests are delivered online without disturbance to the test-taker (i.e., cameras, timing, restricted browsing), nothing stops them from doing research on test questions to figure out what they measure. Regarding test format, test questions which are objective (I have a large family) are more difficult to fake as well as questions which are subtle and only experienced psychologists know what they measure (Snell et al., 1999). Imagine strongly endorsing to I am very good at convincing people thinking it measures assertiveness and leadership, but what if I told you that this question can catch some psychopathic personality too? Finally, tests with response scales with many options to choose from (e.g., the omnipresent strongly disagree - disagree – neutral – agree – strongly agree response scale) are easy to fake. An example for very effective faking – endorsing with Agree and Strongly Agree the socially desirable questions and choosing Neutral for the questions one wants to fake.

Fourth lap – who fakes? Demographics-wise, it seems that males and younger individuals are more prone to faking (Graham et al., 1994; Newstead et al., 1996). Personality-wise, Tett and Simonet (2011) provided a quite comprehensive cluster of faking-inducing traits among which Neuroticism, low Integrity, low Dutifulness (facet of Conscientiousness), high Self-monitoring, high Machiavellianism, high Locus of control and Self-efficacy, high Ambition and high Risk-taking. These traits seem to depict a somewhat antisocial personality with a healthy dose of self-restraint and self-confidence. To use an extreme example, it almost looks like the personality profile of the perfect faker is a mix of a criminal and a very adept manager/political leader. But let us rather listen to Griffith et al. (2011) who argued that whether one will fake, even if he/she possesses most of these traits, depends on the primary appraisal of the goal (e.g., Is this job very desirable for me?), and the secondary reappraisal of the application process (e.g., Is it comparatively easy to fake?). The takeaway is certainly that faking is more contextual than dependent on personality.

Finally, let me discuss a bit more on a point I have overused in this piece – that the job applicant is the ideal personality test faker. One needs not be an applicant for a job to fake – actually incumbents fake too (Zickar et al., 2004). There are various reasons incumbents might want to fake – getting a promotion, getting to resources such as additional development, or simply for personal reasons that we cannot capture in any way except for asking them to confess (of course, no Inquisition pun intended) if they faked and asked them why. This is the Achilles’ heel of all faking research, actually. We never know if someone faked before they admit to it and explain why they faked.

Fifth lap – how to mitigate faking? I realize that there was so much driving today that I need to leave my readers recover before embarking on the twisted journey of answering this ultimately all-important question.

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