Faking Good on the MCMI–III: Implications for Child Custody Evaluations

Abstract

Individuals administered the MCMI–III (Millon, Davis, & Millon, 1997) as part of a custody evaluation have shown elevations on the Desirability (Y), Histrionic (4), Narcissistic (5), and Compulsive (7) scales and low scores on the Debasement (Z) scale (McCann et al., 2001) and all other personality and clinical scales. In this experiment, we instructed participants (N = 138) to look like good parents (fake good) or to answer honestly. The fake-good group scored higher than the honest group on Y, 4, 5, and 7 and lower on scale Z and most other scales. We plotted the mean scale scores of our fake-good group against those of McCann et al.'s custody litigants and found the 2 profiles to be very closely matched and very different from our answer-honestly group's profile. These findings raise the possibility that scale elevations on 4, 5, and 7 by custody litigants are artifacts of faking good rather than pathology in those areas. Assessors should interpret this profile cautiously in custody evaluations.

Acknowledgments

We thank Craig Speelman and Ricks Allan for helpful comments on an earlier draft of this article. In particular we thank Wally Howe of Psychological Assessments for providing complimentary electronic scorings of the MCMI–III data.

Notes

^a Positive values indicate a higher score in the fake-good group; negative values indicate a higher score in the control group.

∗ p < .05.