Impact of electronic warnings on online personality scores and test-taker reactions in an applicant simulation

This study investigates the impact of different types of electronic warnings during a simulated job application assessment. Results indicated that negatively worded warnings and accusations worked better than positively worded warnings at blunting faking. Although there was some evidence that test-takers engaging in higher levels of faking heeded warnings more, warnings tended to decrease scores for all test-takers. While positive warnings motivated test-takers to perform well, negative warnings and accusations increased test-taking anxiety. Whereas past research has failed to find a relationship between warnings and perceived fairness, current results suggest that this relationship depends on the level of test-taker distortion. Despite the popular use of personality inventories, a concern with applied personality measurement is that job applicants will distort, or fake, their test behavior, resulting in an overly-positive score. Research widely supports this fear, with estimates indicating that somewhere between a quarter to half of surveyed job applicants distort their responses to personality measures the evidence that faking is a threat to hiring decisions and construct validity is becoming more difficult to dismiss The assertion that faking might cause adverse outcomes is supported by the argument that when selection ratios are low, people who fake have a disproportionately greater chance of being hired, even if the criterion-related validity is unaffected (Marcus, 2006). Several studies have illustrated that faking can also have implications for hiring decisions (Christiansen, Goffin, Johnston, & Rothstein, 1994). Furthermore, claims that faking has no impact on predictive validity are weakened by the fact that scales designed to measure faking (e.g., social desirability) are correlated to honest personality scores of interest (e.g., conscientiousness, agreeableness, and emotional stability) (McCrae & Costa, 1983; Ones et al., 1996). This makes it difficult to tell whether applicants who score high on social desirability scales are faking, or if they truly have elevated personality traits (Goffin & Christiansen, 2003), thus giving less credibility to the viewpoint that faking has little to no impact on criterion-related validity, and reigniting an interest in further exploring the antecedents and outcomes of response distortion. The concern about faking has inspired a wide range of techniques to counteract applicant distortion. These techniques can generally be broken down into two broad categories, proactive or reactive, and a third that combines both. First, there are proactive attempts to keep applicants from engaging in faking behavior. Such methods include the use of subtle or forced-choice item formats Second, there has been …