Socially desirable responding in personality assessment: Not necessarily faking and not necessarily substance

We investigated the moderating effects of socially desirable responding on the criterion validity of self-report personality. For 602 undergraduates responding to a Big Five personality measure, eight different moderator indices failed to demonstrate that correlations between self-report and peer-report were influenced, either linearly or quadratically, by socially desirable responding. Measures of socially desirable responding were associated with various self-report personality scales but generally independent of peer ratings of personality. It was concluded that socially desirable responding can be method variance that is unrelated to faking and unrelated to substantive personality.