Acquiescent and Socially Desirable Response Styles in Cross-Cultural Value Surveys

The present chapter presents two studies examining the differential effects of acquiescence and social desirability on value scores across cultures. In the first study, culture-level acquiescence indexes were extracted from data in eight multinational surveys, and culture-level social desirability scores were obtained from a meta-analysis of the Marlowe-Crowne Social Desirability Scale. Both types of indexes were correlated with cultural value dimensions reported in the literature and with indicators of affluence. We found that affluence explains a substantial proportion of the variance in the association of response styles with value scores in all the surveys. The second study investigated effects of score standardization. This study was based on a large cross-cultural data set collected with the Schwartz Value Survey (SVS). We found that value score standardization had some effect on the correlations of acquiescence with various value types, but only limited effects on social desirability. We conclude that affluence affects the relationship of response styles and value scores. Implications for the interpretation of cross-cultural differences in response styles and value surveys are discussed.