This paper presents a series of pre-registered analyses testing the same theoretically derived hypothesis: If (a) the attitudes that perceivers have toward targets contribute to the variance of judgments on most items, and (b) items’ rated social desirability values align very closely with the extent to which that is the case, then the product of two items’ mid-point-centered social desirability values should predict the amount of shared variance, and thus the correlation, between these items. This hypothesis applies equally to other ratings and self-ratings. Across samples, effect sizes ranged from r = .36 to r = .80 (average r = .61) and were statistically significant in every single case. We also found that the average effect is much larger for other-ratings ( r = .71) than for self-ratings ( r = .49). This difference was also replicable and is likely rooted in the greater relative importance of the attitude factor in other-ratings, as compared to self-ratings. An exploratory item resampling analysis suggested that scales may achieve good internal consistency, and correlate substantially with other scales, based solely on shared attitude variance. We discuss the relevance of these findings across different domains of psychological assessment, and possible ways of dealing with the issue.

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According to ideomotor theory, when people perform a movement and observe its subsequent effect, they acquire a bidirectional action-effect association. If at a later point they want to produce the effect, its anticipation activates and allows executing the corresponding action. In ideomotor induction tasks, several task characteristics determine whether participants use the experimentally induced action-effect associations to pre-activate the corresponding actions. Here, we assess the impact of the verbal instruction, the task relevance of the effect stimuli and the presentation of post-response effects on the expression of action-effect associations. The results show that an instruction stressing the stimulus-effect correspondence prompts participants to utilize the presented effects more than an instruction stressing the stimulus-response correspondence. Furthermore, the induced action-effect associations were only expressed when the effects were relevant for the task and when post-response effects were presented in the test phase. These findings show the importance of the particular task construction for the expression of the experimentally manipulated action-effect knowledge.

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