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The Effect of Different Instructions and Their Order on the Bias of Measured Personality Traits by Social Desirability

Abstract

Social desirability is a tendency to respond to items in a socially acceptable way. It can bias results and is a threat to the validity of the measure. The current study focused on exploring the effect of different instructions on personality traits. The sample consists of 363 Slovak adults, 260 women, and 103 men. The participants were between 18 and 62 years old (M = 25.6; SD = 6.76). The Big Five Inventory-2 was used for measuring personality traits and social desirability. The participants were split into two groups depending on which instruction was administered first – honest setting or social desirability inducing setting (imagining the selection situation). All participants responded to both scenarios. We hypothesized that extraversion, agreeableness, and conscientiousness are socially desirable traits, and so they will be higher using selection simulating instruction compared to honest instruction. The opposite was hypothesized for negative emotionality. The social desirability of open-mindedness was explored. The results confirmed all our hypotheses and showed that open-mindedness is a socially desirable trait as well. Importantly, we found an effect of the order of administrating different instructions – the effect of induced social desirability was present in the honest instruction setting.