Chapter 2: A History of Faking and Socially Desirable Responding on Personality Tests

In recent years, there has been a heightened concern among psychologists about the threat of misrepresentation on personality tests; with over 900 articles, book chapters, and dissertations published since 2000 alone that have investigated misrepresentation in some form.¹ This edited volume of chapters is a culmination of the recent research attention of this important topic in the field of industrial-organizational (IO) psychology. As will be detailed in this chapter, there have been periodic waves of concern about response distortion throughout the history of personality testing. In fact, concerns about response distortion on personality inventories are nearly as old as the personality tests themselves. In this chapter we review the earliest response distortion research including topics of faking and socially desirable responding. At places throughout the chapter, the concepts of faking and socially desirable responding will seem intertwined with each other. This is important to note because early researchers often failed to distinguish between conscious faking and unconscious socially desirable responding. The evolution of the understanding of response distortion is one of the themes that we explore.