Perceived ability to deceive and incremental prediction in pre-employment personality testing

Personality tests now play an important role in pre-employment testing. However, faking, or purposefully distorting personality test responses, is a long-standing concern in this venue. The purpose of this research was to create and evaluate a measure, the Perceived Ability to Deceive scale (PATD), to help better understand individual differences related to faking. PATD demonstrated evidence of reliability and discriminant validity. Moreover, we tested whether PATD could significantly add to the prediction of a workplace criterion in personnel selection settings. As hypothesized, PATD significantly predicted incremental variance in Counterproductive Work Behavior (CWB) beyond Conscientiousness, Agreeableness, Emotional Stability, and Honesty–Humility. Overall, our results suggested that PATD is distinct from other faking-related measures and may provide new insights into the process of faking in pre-employment personality testing.

► Faking remains a concern in pre-employment personality testing.
► PATD scale created to better understand individual differences related to faking.
► It demonstrated evidence of reliability and discriminant validity.
► It predicted incremental variance in a work-related outcome beyond personality.
► PATD may provide new insights into the processes underlying faking.