One of the most robust ways that people protect themselves from social-evaluative threat is by emphasizing the desirability of their personal characteristics, yet the neural underpinnings of this fundamental process are unknown. The current fMRI study addresses this question by examining self-evaluations of desirability (in comparison with other people) as a response to threat. Participants jud...

Public opinion polls consistently show that a growing majority of Americans support same-sex marriage. Critics, however, raise the possibility that these polls are plagued by social desirability bias, and thereby may overstate public support for gay and lesbian rights. We test this proposition using a list experiment embedded in the 2013 Cooperative Congressional Election Study. List experiment...

ABSTRACT Increased age has been found to be associated with differences in affect and personality that have been interpreted in terms of better emotional regulation and increased maturity. However, these findings have largely been based on self-report data, and the primary goal of the current research was to investigate the hypothesis that age-related differences in affect and in certain desira...

Unproctored, web-based assessments supposedly reduce social desirability distortions in self-report questionnaires because of an increased sense of privacy among participants. Three random-effects meta-analyses focusing either on social desirability ( k = 30, total N = 3,746), the Big Five of personality ( k = 66, total N = 2,951), or psychopathology ( k = 96, total N = 16,034) compared social ...

An analysis of social desirability in personality assessment is presented. Starting with the symptoms, Study 1 showed that mean ratings of graded personality items are moderately to strongly linearly related to social desirability (Self Deception, Impression formation, and the first Principal Component), suggesting that item popularity may be a useful heuristic tool for identifying items which ...

The correlation between general intelligence (g), a general factor of personality (GFP), and social desirability was examined in a sample of 507 siblings. Each sibling within a pair was examined separately, creating two groups. Individuals had completed an omnibus personality inventory measuring 20 personality traits as well as a timed, group administered intelligence test. Factor analyses on t...

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 Impressi...

The self-reference effect (SRE), by which encoding of information is done in a self-referential manner (e.g., "Does the word describe you?"), enhances subsequent memory performance. It is thought to reflect that self-reference is a highly practiced task in everyday life. Accordingly, it is expected that the types of tasks that produce memory enhancement vary according to individual differences ...

Background and Aim: This study examined the role of social desirability, self-esteem, and some demographic variables in predicting students’ attitudes toward people with physical-motor disabilities. Procedure: The participants in this cross-sectional study were 300 students at Kurdistan University selected using convenience sampling. The students completed the items in the Google forms of the ...