Social Desirability Scales as Indicators of Self-Enhancement and Impression Management

Abstract

This article presents 2 studies testing Paulhus's (2002) assumption that unconscious self-enhancement and conscious impression management represent separate processes of socially desirable responding (SDR) that can be observed within 2 content domains (egoistic and moralistic bias). In Study 1, we devised egoistic and moralistic SDR scales intended to measure self-enhancement in honest responding and impression management under demands for positive self-presentation. In Study 2, we correlated scores on these scales with external indicators of self-enhancement and impression management. In honest responding, both SDR scales most strongly correlated with self-enhancement indicators, whereas under demands for positive self-presentation they correlated more strongly with external measures of impression management.

Notes

All age and gender differences between the first honest sample and the other three samples were statistically significant at the p <.001 level. The effect sizes of the differences were moderate to large, ranging from.33 to.81 for age and from.75 to.86 for gender.

In all confirmatory analyses, we allowed the error terms of the items “Every day I come up with creative, ingenious ideas” and “I’m usually the one to come up with big ideas” to correlate because of evident similarity in the content. All other error terms were uncorrelated throughout the confirmatory models.