On the robustness of description and experience based decision tasks to social desirability

We compared the sensitivity of two classes of decision tasks to social desirability: Description-based tasks and experience-based tasks. Participants completed a battery of decision tasks in two conditions: A Control condition in which they were asked to perform their best, and an Impression condition in which they were required to impress judges in the context of hiring decisions. The Impression condition was predicted to elicit relatively lower levels of risk taking than the Control condition. This was confirmed for the description-based tasks while the experience-based tasks were fairly robust to the impression manipulation. This finding points to the potential of experience-based tasks’ for assessing individual differences, particularly in situations where social desirability is prevalent. A second finding is that risk taking levels showed consistency across the description-experience divide, but in line with the different sensitivity of the tasks to social desirability, this was only observed in the Control condition.