Chapter 3: Seven Nested Questions About Faking on Personality Tests: An Overview and Interactionist Model of Item-Level Response Distortion

Calling someone a liar, a cheat, or a fake is typically not undertaken lightly; being called one can be cause for assault. The severity of such acts and accusations derives from a breakdown of trust: interdependence between friends, family, and cohorts improves one’s chances to survive and flourish, and insincerity, when detected, can destroy beneficial alliances. Accordingly, lying, cheating, and faking fall, for the most part, on the dark side of human nature, and efforts to prevent, identify, and predict such behaviors are eagerly if not passionately pursued.

Faking in psychological assessment has been a recurring theme since the advent of self-report measures (Helmes, 2000; Paulhus, 2002). Psychological constructs targeted for assessment reduce to two general types: characteristics permitting measurement involving objectively right and wrong answers (e.g., ability, skill, knowledge) and traits requiring self-description (e.g., personality, attitudes, values). The former carry the advantage of verifiability; the latter are inherently more subjective. A critical implication is that people tend not to fake on ability, skill, or knowledge tests (they may deliberately underperform in rare cases where high scores yield undesired outcomes; e.g., in military drafts). Asking people to describe themselves, on the other hand, is an open invitation to fake good or bad, especially when responses could be used to benefit or harm the respondent.