Chapter 6: Applicant Faking Behavior: Teasing Apart the Influence of Situational Variance, Cognitive Biases, and Individual Differences

There is now considerable evidence to suggest that a significant portion of applicants fake their responses to personality measures (Donovan, Dwight, & Hurtz, 2003; Donovan, Dwight, & Schneider, 2005; Griffith, Chmielowski, & Yoshita, in press; McDaniel, Douglas, & Snell, 1997; Rosse, Stecher, Miller, & Levin, 1998; Stokes, Hogan, & Snell, 1993). This support does little to ease the minds of practitioners who have had a long history of concern regarding the impact of faking on their selection decisions. Why are practitioners concerned? What is it about someone who fakes his or her score that HR professionals find undesirable? Those who design selection procedures never promised perfect prediction, and selection errors are made at a much higher rate than I/O psychologists would like to admit. But there is something about fakers that makes them stand out. Much of this anxiety regarding applicant faking stems from assumptions that we have about deception.