New Perspectives on Faking in Personality Assessments

In this volume, a diverse group of world experts in personality assessment showcase a range of different viewpoints on response distortion. Contributors consider what it means to "fake" a personality assessment, why and how people try to obtain particular scores on personality tests, and what types of tests people can successfully manipulate. The authors present and discuss the usefulness of a range of traditional and cutting-edge methods for detecting and controlling the practice of faking. These methods include social desirability (lie) scales, warnings, affective neutralization, unidimensional and multidimensional pairwise preferences, decision trees, linguistic analysis, situational measures, and methods based on item response theory. The wide range of viewpoints presented in this book are then summarized, synthesized, and evaluated. The authors make practical recommendations and suggest areas for future research. Anyone who wonders whether people exaggerate or lie outright on personality tests -- or questions what psychologists can and should do about it -- will find in this book stimulating questions and useful answers.

Matthias Ziegler is a Junior Professor of Psychological Assessment at the Humboldt-Universiti??t zu Berlin. His main research areas are personality and intelligence, and he deals specifically with various assessment approaches, the role of faking, and the interaction between different constructs to predict academic and job performance and knowledge.

Carolyn MacCann is a psychology lecturer at the University of Sydney. She specializes in developing innovative assessment methods for psychological constructs, particularly as they relate to emotional intelligence, noncognitive assessments, and response distortion.

Richard D. Roberts is a Principal Research Scientist in the Center for Academic and Workplace Readiness and Success at the Educational Testing Service in Princeton, New Jersey. His area of specialization is applied psychology, with a focus on educational and psychological assessment. He has published over 150 scientific papers and 9 books in areas as diverse as wind engineering, sensory processes, human cognitive abilities, emotions, personality, cognitive enhancement, and diurnal preference. With Moshe Zeidner and Gerald Matthews, he co-authored What We Know about Emotional Intelligence: How It Affects Learning, Work, Relationships, and Out Mental Health, which won a 2009 PROSE Award.