Employers worry that job applicants fake their answers on personality tests. A study of simulated retail sales hiring suggests that the people who are best at faking may actually be the ones employers want: brighter, more emotionally intelligent and less inclined toward psychopathic or immoral behaviour.
The research was done by Sarah J. Carver of Saint Mary’s University in Halifax and Cullen W. D. McCurrach and Richard D. Goffin of the University of Western Ontario. It was published online in the Journal of Personnel Psychology on November 8, 2024.
Honest answers versus applicant answers
The team recruited 428 employed adults in the United States and Canada through Amazon’s Mechanical Turk and removed 81 for careless responding, leaving 347 participants aged 21 to 63.
Participants first answered personality questions honestly and completed measures of traits such as psychopathy, Machiavellianism, a competitive worldview that endorses ruthlessness to get ahead, immorality and self-esteem, along with a cognitive ability test. They also reported their real counterproductive and helpful behaviours at work.
They then read a detailed description of a retail sales job and answered personality items again, this time as if applying and trying to get hired. Faking ability was measured as how much their extraversion scores rose beyond what their honest answers predicted, a method the authors call the gold standard. Extraversion was chosen because it predicts sales performance and is the trait sales applicants inflate most.
The instructions worked. Extraversion scores jumped sharply in the applicant round, a large effect size of d = 1.47.
Better fakers had fewer dark traits
Contrary to the researchers’ own first set of predictions, faking ability went with less of the traits employers dislike. Better fakers scored lower on competitive worldviews (r = -.29), psychopathy (r = -.29), immorality (r = -.26) and counterproductive work behaviour (r = -.18). Machiavellianism showed no link.
Faking ability went with more of the traits employers value. Better fakers had higher general mental ability (r = .25), were better at identifying which traits the test measured and which matter for a salesperson (r = .17), and scored higher on achievement striving (r = .16), openness to ideas (r = .15) and emotional intelligence (r = .12).
Not every prediction held. Faking ability was negatively related to self-monitoring and unrelated to need for approval, helpful work behaviour and self-esteem. All of the correlations were small to moderate.
A result tied to sales jobs
The authors suggest that the ability to fake well reflects an understanding of what a job demands, which may be useful in client-facing roles that rely on impression management. They note that their participants averaged 20 years of work experience, unlike the students used in many earlier faking studies.
They also caution that the findings come from a simulated test for a single type of job and may not carry over to other settings. In educational or business contexts, they note, earlier work has linked faking to less desirable traits.
Study Details:
- Title: Should Faking Ability on Pre-Employment Tests Be Reviled or Revered in Retail Sales?
- Authors: Sarah J. Carver, Cullen W. D. McCurrach, Richard D. Goffin
- Journal: Journal of Personnel Psychology
- Publication Date: November 8, 2024
- DOI: 10.1027/1866-5888/a000359