Chapter 14: What Do We know and Where Do We Go?: Practical Directions for Faking Research

It would be wrong of us to presume that we know what motivates the authors in this volume to pursue research on faking on personality tests in selection contexts. However, we would venture to guess that the “voice of the common man” plays a role for many of the authors, just as it does for us. We hear via e-mail or phone from the manager who wants to do away with his organization’s personality testing because “people can fake” or from the human resources (HR) professional who is frustrated because she cannot convince top management of the utility of personality testing. We have encounters with the friend/family member/acquaintance who complains about the unfairness of using a test others will “lie” on and gain an unfair advantage. We recognize that there is a public sentiment that faking is a problem when it comes to using personality tests in selection (Hoffman, 2000; Song, 2005). Thus, we are probably not inferring too much if we were to say that the authors in this volume are pursuing this research topic for the same reason that many psychologists pursue a research stream—to determine the veracity of the folk wisdom. Psychologists, as social scientists, are often addressing the question of whether the received wisdom regarding human behavior is indeed correct (Siegfried, 1994), and thus research on faking is really an investigation into a lay theory of response to personality tests in selection contexts.