Contextual cues as a source of response bias in personality questionnaires: The case of the NEO‐FFI

Abstract

Two experiments demonstrated the susceptibility of a standard personality inventory to response bias elicited by contextual cues. In Study 1, participants who completed the NEO-FFI in a simulated application for a job stereotypically associated with extraversion (a journalist) scored higher on the extraversion scale than those who completed it under standard instructions. The increase occurred in response to the job label 'journalist' and in response to a job description stressing extraversion-related qualities. In Study 2, a priming procedure was used to elicit cognitive response distortions. Participants exposed to an extraverted stimulus person scored higher on extraversion than participants completing the NEO-FFI under standard instructions. No effects were found on the remaining scales of the NEO-FFI.

The Compatibility of Personality and Social Identity Processes: The Effect of Gender Identity on Neuroticism

“…Possibly, explanations other than identity shifts would be more suitable for explaining these unexpected changes (e.g. Krahé, Becker & Zöllter, ; Perugini & Richetin, ). More importantly, we did not consider possible main effects of repeated measurements to be crucial as our hypothesis concerned interaction effects.…”

Social Desirability Scales as Indicators of Self-Enhancement and Impression Management

“…We chose those two occupations because successful performance in them is stereotypically related to certain personality characteristics from the egoistic (manager) and moralistic (teacher) bias domains. The procedure that included simulated selections for stereotypical occupations was used in the other studies about desirable responding on personality questionnaires (e.g., Pauls & Crost, 2005;Krahé, Becker, & Zollter, 2008). We motivated the participants for our study with the information that they would have the opportunity to gain practice by completing the employment selection tests commonly used by organizations to select graduate students for entry-level positions.…”

Do Applicants Fake Their Personality Questionnaire Responses and How Successful are Their Attempts? A Case of Military Pilot Cadet Selection

“…In addition, respondents are able to distort their responses in line with specific expectation about desired personality traits (Krahé, 1989;Paulhus, Bruce, & Trapnell, 1995). When instructed to fake their responses in order to present themselves as ideal applicants for different occupations ('fake job' situation), participants give different personality descriptions (Furnham, 1990;Krahé, Becker, & Zollter, 2008;Velicer & Weiner, 1975).These descriptions deviate from honest responses but also from ideal personality profiles obtained under 'fake good' instruction (Mahar, Cologon, & Duck, 1995;Pauls & Crost, 2005). However, none of the studies mentioned previously tells us how successful respondents in their attempts to fake personality profile are.…”

“…In order to resolve this issue and better understand faking, we compared personality profiles from an actual personnel selection (a military pilot cadets selection) with those from participants responding honestly, presenting an ideal personality profile (‘fake good’ instruction), or giving an ideal candidate description (‘fake job’ instruction). Based on the results of the studies that compared honest responding with general ‘fake good’ instructions (Viswesvaran & Ones, ), different ‘fake job’ instructions (e.g., Furnham, ; Krahé et al., ), and applicants with job incumbents (Birkeland et al., ), we expected to show the following:…”