Faking Good and Faking Bad Among Military Conscripts

Abstract

A question that continues to worry practitioners and researchers is how much recruiters can trust self-reported measures of personality. Several models of faking assume that applicants differ in their motivation to fake, but field evidence regarding these differences is still rare. For the current field study, we exploited a unique setting: The examination for compulsory military service in Switzerland. We were able to show that differences in the military service motivation of Swiss conscripts (N = 918) were associated with faking good or faking bad, respectively. In particular, military service motivation was related to self-admitted faking, mean personality scores, and increased correlations between personality dimensions, which supports faking models that stress the importance of motivational differences.

Notes

¹ We thank Martin Gubler for pointing this out to us.