The relationship between the judged desirability of a trait and the probability that the trait will be endorsed.

Abstract

There is a rather common suspicion among many psychologists that subjects tend to give what are considered to be socially desirable responses to items in personality inventories. This suspicion has been given public expression in a recent article by Gordon (3, p. 407) who comments upon . . the motivation of a majority of respondents to mark socially acceptable alternatives to items, rather than those which they believe apply to themselves. We have here two problems. One concerns the truthfulness of a subject's answers to items in a personality inventory, i.e., whether the response accurately describes the subject. The answer to this question implies that we have available some independent criterion in terms of which the inventory response is to be evaluated. The other problem concerns the relationship between a subject's response to an item and the social desirability of that item, i.e., whether the subject tends to give a positive answer to an item that is socially desirable and a negative answer to an item that is not. The answer to this question implies that we have available some measure of the social desirability of the item to which the response can be related. It is this problem we wish to report upon here.