Psychopathy and the detection of faking on self-report inventories of personality

This study examined whether psychopathic traits enabled faking on self-report inventories. Two hundred undergraduates completed a psychopathy measure under standard conditions prior to answering personality and validity scales under faking good, faking bad, and standard instructions. Given the deceptiveness of psychopaths, successful fakers were expected to score higher on psychopathic traits than respondents caught faking. Results showed that although successful and unsuccessful fakers did not differ on general psychopathy, respondents successful at faking good scored higher than unsuccessful fakers on factors of machiavellian egocentricity and blame externalization and lower on stress immunity.