Measuring social desirability in psychology: Consequences and control practices

Social desirability is one of the most common sources of bias affecting the validity of experimental and survey research findings. Indeed, social desirability, or the propensity to give untrue answers to appear as a socially deserving person (Paulhus, 1991), can alter the measurement of psychological constructs with self-report questionnaires. Two different strategies can be adopted to control social desirability: 1) prevent or reduce, 2) detect and measure. The first strategy involves, for example, the use of forced-choice or randomized items; the second strategy includes scales for identifying and excluding potential simulators. A combination of prevention and detection methods offers the best choice available for controlling social desirability bias. Psychology researchers usually use prevention methods and only rarely include a scale for measuring SD in their research. The present work aims to describe the most widely used social desirability scales and show how the detection and exclusion of potential simulators can modify the results of psychological studies.