Individual differences in the ability to fake on personality measures

Industrial psychologists continue to chastise personality measures for their potential threats to predictive validity because of assumed fakability. While the extent of such threats to predictive validity continue to be debated, no researchers appear to have looked at the fakability construct as a possible individual difference variable in its own right. Therefore, in the present study 323 subjects completed a Big Five measure twice, at 1 week apart. Faking was measured by within-subject correlations between the honest and fake conditions. While it was hypothesized that the ability to fake good would be conceptually related to self-presentation, the results suggest that the ability to fake is an independent construct. The potential usefulness of several indices of faking are discussed, as are future directions for research in this area.