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...

This study examined the effects of residual nervous system arousal on perceptions of sexual attraction. Researchers approached individuals (males, n = 165; females, n = 135) at amusement parks as they were either waiting to begin or as they had just gotten off a roller-coaster ride. Participants were shown a photograph of an average attractive, opposite-gendered individual and asked to rate the...

This study examined the effects of residual nervous system arousal on perceptions of sexual attraction. Researchers approached individuals (males, n = 165; females, n = 135) at amusement parks as they were either waiting to begin or as they had just gotten off a roller-coaster ride. Participants were shown a photograph of an average attractive, opposite-gendered individual and asked to rate the...

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...

According to alcohol myopia theory (Steele and Josephs in Am Psychol 45:921–933, 1990) intoxicated people disproportionally focus on the most salient aspects of a situation and ignore peripheral information. We investigated whether consuming alcohol leads people to disproportionally focus on the desirability rather than feasibility of important personal goals. Students named an important person...

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 ...

This study's aim was to assess the validity of naive subjects' implicit personality theories, the correspondence among the theories, and the influence of social desirability on them. High school girls classified the items from the MMPI Psychopathic Deviate scale into clusters representing different traits. These clusters agreed closely with the factors obtained in previous factor analyses of se...

Multidimensional scaling analysis was used to examine adolescents' cognitive appraisals of major and daily stressful events. The desirability of events was the only salient feature for early adolescents. Middle and late adolescents also appraised events in terms of their desirability; in addition, the amount of impact that events exerted on their lives and the generality of the causes of events...

Social judgment data was analyzed using fuzzy least squares regression analysis based on the extension principle. The proposed analysis is new fuzzy least squares regression analysis in which input data, output data, and coefficients are represented by L-R fuzzy numbers. To evaluate data fitness, we propose a fuzzy version of a squared multiple correlation (R) and conducted an experiment to det...