Overclaiming as a measure of faking

Researchers have recently asserted that popular measures of response distortion (i.e., socially desirable responding scales) lack construct validity (i.e., measure traits rather than test faking) and that applicant faking on personality tests remains a serious concern (Griffith and Peterson, 2008 and Holden, 2008). Thus, although researchers and human resource (HR) selection specialists have been attempting to find measures which readily capture individual differences in faking that increase personality test validity, to date such attempts have rarely, if ever succeeded. The current study, however, finds that the overclaiming technique captures individual differences in faking and subsequently increases personality test score validity via suppressing unwanted error variance in personality test scores. Implications of this research on the overclaiming technique for improving HR selection decisions are illustrated and discussed.

► Overclaiming and self-reports of socially desirable responding (SDR) are used to assess individual differences in faking.
► Overclaiming reliably captures individual differences in faking on personality tests whereas SDR does not.
► Overclaiming suppresses systematic error variance due to faking in personality scale scores to increase their validity.
► SDR self-reports do not suppress systematic error variance due to faking and do not increase personality test validity.
► Demonstrations of how overclaiming can be used to improve personality test validity and hiring decisions are then presented.