Social Desirability in Personality Testing of Military Officers

Abstract

The tendency among Swedish military officers to answer in a socially desirable way when taking some personality tests was investigated. Participants were 216 Army, Navy, and Air Force captains. The test used for measuring social desirability was the Marlowe–Crowne Social Desirability Scale (M-C SDS; Crowne & Marlowe, 1960 Crowne, D. P., & Marlowe, D. (1960). A new scale of social desirability independent of psychopathology. Journal of Consulting Psychology, 24, 349–354.[Crossref], [PubMed] , [Google Scholar]) and a subset of those test items. Data revealed a strong tendency among the officers to answer in a socially desirable manner compared to earlier data from testing with the M-C SDS and compared to data from a sample of Swedish students of economics. M-C SDS correlated significantly with all 3 of the personality tests used. The comparably strong tendency to answer in a socially desirable way could be due to in part a need for many individuals to “look good” and in part due to difficulties of applying a 5-step Likert scale to the items of the M-C SDS.