Liar! Liar! (when stakes are higher): Understanding how the overclaiming technique can be used to measure faking in personnel selection.

Abstract

Aside from consulting fees, charged by a university, for the administration and scoring of the assessments of the Firefighter applicants in Study 1, the authors received no financial support for the research, authorship, or publication of this article. A percentage of the profit of commercial use of the HEXACO-PI-R is used by the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam to support research by Reinout E. de Vries.

Testing competing claims about overclaiming

“…In the original OCQ (OCQ-150; Paulhus et al, 2003), participants were asked to rate their familiarity with 150 items by rating them on a scale ranging from "never heard of it" to "know it very well". Since then, the OCT and a variety of OCQs were developed and used in psychological research (e.g., Atir et al, 2015;Dunlop et al, 2017Dunlop et al, , 2019Mesmer-Magnus et al, 2006;Pennycook & Rand, 2019;Ziegler et al, 2013). Although alternative assessment methods of overclaiming are interesting, we will not further discuss them here and will instead focus on competing scoring methods of conventional OCQs.…”

“…Paulhus and colleagues (2003) concluded that the OCT is useful to assess the proneness to selfenhance, which would be a useful instrument in various contexts that rely on self-report measures (e.g., personnel selection), as these frequently suffer from various biases (Van Vaerenbergh & Thomas, 2013;Ziegler, 2015). Generally, engaging in overclaiming has been described as a potentially economical marker for positivity biases or self-enhancement tendencies (e.g, Bensch et al, 2017;Dunlop et al, 2019;Paulhus et al, 2003). It has been considered as a type of remedy and an efficient mean of assessing individual differences in the tendency to systematically misrepresent oneself in self-reports (Ludeke & Makransky, 2016;Paulhus et al, 2003;Paulhus & Harms, 2004).…”

“…This relationship makes sense, because describing oneself (deliberately) in a more positive manner should correspond to being less honest and less humble. The same logic can be applied to the association of overclaiming with honestyhumility, although recent evidence shows no relation between different indices of overclaiming and honesty-humility (OC bias: Dunlop et al, 2019;Müller & Moshagen, 2019; mean familiarity ratings of foils: Steger et al, 2020), thus suggesting overclaiming corresponds to unintentionally overrating one's abilities.…”

“…Apart from honesty-humility, faking was repeatedly described as a deliberate positive self-presentation or an intentional bias (e.g., Dunlop et al, 2019;Geiger et al, 2018;Ziegler, 2011), and the degree to which it met requirements should be considered an ability (Geiger et al, 2018). In line with this idea and given theoretical accounts of faking ability (e.g., Ziegler, 2011), it should be considered that the setting in which an OCQ is administered (low-stakes vs. high-stakes) might play an important role for the validity of overclaiming as a potential marker of deliberate positive self-representations such as faking (Dunlop et al, 2019).…”

“…Apart from honesty-humility, faking was repeatedly described as a deliberate positive self-presentation or an intentional bias (e.g., Dunlop et al, 2019;Geiger et al, 2018;Ziegler, 2011), and the degree to which it met requirements should be considered an ability (Geiger et al, 2018). In line with this idea and given theoretical accounts of faking ability (e.g., Ziegler, 2011), it should be considered that the setting in which an OCQ is administered (low-stakes vs. high-stakes) might play an important role for the validity of overclaiming as a potential marker of deliberate positive self-representations such as faking (Dunlop et al, 2019). More precisely, the evidence that the OC bias index is predictive of faking in low-stakes settings is rather weak (Dunlop et al, 2019;Feeney & Goffin, 2015;Ludeke & Makransky, 2016;Müller & Moshagen, 2019), higher in high-stakes setting (e.g., Bing et al, 2011; al., 2019), but still not ubiquitous (Bensch et al, 2019).…”