A theory of applicant faking: The interaction of dispositional characteristics, item characteristics, and respondent cognitive processes

The susceptibility of self-report assessments of personality to faking on the part of respondents in personnel selection settings remains a consistent point of focus for personality researchers. While research in this area has progressed in identifying antecedents and trait-situation interactions that are predictive of faking behavior, theoretical examinations of the underlying response processes involved in faking have been lacking. The present study set out to develop and test a portion of a theory of faking that has three basic assumptions. First, faking is an item-level behavior which may or may not result in scale-level increases that have typically been used to measure faking. Second, faking is a product of situational (e.g., item characteristics) and individual (e.g., dispositional intelligence) determinants. Finally, faking and responding honestly rely on similar cognitive processes, while differing in the types of information accessed during the formulation of a response. These assumptions were tested using a within-subjects directed-faking manipulation in which all respondents provided personality item responses under both "honest" and "fake-good" instructions. Respondents also provided self-reports of their information processing strategies under both instructional sets in order to determine the types of information used to arrive at responses to the individual items. The results of the study provided mixed support for the first two assumptions. First, respondents' attempts at faking and ability to do so effectively appeared to vary across items and across scales. Responses to the extraversion items were considerably more variable than responses to the conscientiousness items and respondents often reported information processing strategies consistent with faking even though their personality item responses did not reflect this motive. Second, mixed support was found for the influence of the dispositional and cognitive variables examined in the present study. Dispositional intelligence was positively related to the formation of accurate implicit job theories in addition to being positively related to faking operationalized as score increases on the conscientiousness scale. The use of job-relevant trait-based information processing was also positively related to score increases on the conscientiousness scale. Finally, little support was found for theory's third assumption regarding the similarity between accurate honest responding and effective faking.