Personality Assessment and Social Desirability Measurement

Personality assessment seeks to quantify enduring patterns of thoughts, feelings and behaviours, typically through self-report instruments that map individuals onto major trait dimensions such as the Big Five. A longstanding challenge in this field is social desirability bias, whereby respondents distort their answers to appear more favourable or to conform to perceived expectations. This can take the form of conscious impression management or more automatic self-deceptive enhancement. Researchers have advanced both questionnaire design strategies—such as forced-choice formats and mixed Likert/forced-choice hybrids—and psychometric modelling approaches—including compensatory item response theory (IRT) frameworks and Thurstonian IRT—to mitigate distortions and recover true trait estimates. Beyond theoretical refinements, there is growing attention to the cross-cultural validity of social desirability constructs, the interplay between faking ability and cognitive resources, and the balance between reliability, validity and applicant reactions in high-stakes contexts. Practical applications span personnel selection, health behaviour surveys and clinical screening, with the ultimate goal of ensuring that personality measures yield equitable, interpretable and predictive scores.

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Personality Assessment and Social Desirability Measurement publication trend

The graph below shows the total number of articles in personality assessment and social desirability measurement across all publications each year (not limited to Nature Index journals).

Technical terms

Forced-choice format: A questionnaire design in which respondents must select between equally desirable statements, reducing the opportunity to inflate socially valued traits.

Likert scale: A rating format that asks respondents to indicate agreement or frequency on a graded scale, often vulnerable to response styles such as acquiescence and desirability bias.

Social desirability bias: The tendency of respondents to present themselves in a favourable light, either through conscious impression management or unconscious self-deception.

Impression management: Deliberate alteration of responses to influence how others perceive one’s traits or behaviours.

Thurstonian IRT: A psychometric modelling approach for forced-choice data that estimates latent trait scores by assuming normally distributed preferences underlying comparative judgments.

Ipsativity: A characteristic of some forced-choice scoring methods where individual scores sum to a constant, complicating inter-person comparisons.

References

1. Improving Reactions to Forced-Choice Personality Measures in Simulated Job Application Contexts Through the Satisfaction of Psychological Needs. Journal of Business and Psychology (2023).
2. Measuring social desirability bias in a multi-ethnic cohort sample: its relationship with self-reported physical activity, dietary habits, and factor structure. BMC Public Health (2023).
3. Controlling for Response Biases in Self-Report Scales: Forced-Choice vs. Psychometric Modeling of Likert Items. Frontiers in Psychology (2019).
4. On the Information Obtainable from Comparative Judgments. Psychometrika (2022).
5. Integration of the Forced-Choice Questionnaire and the Likert Scale: A Simulation Study. Frontiers in Psychology (2017).