Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.), Bowling Green State University, 2019, Psychology/Industrial-Organizational
This study's main argument was that faking on personality tests is a function of
intelligence, personality (adaptive and maladaptive), and values. I expected that highly intelligent
fakers would successfully fake the job-relevant traits for the job they were either already holding
(incumbents) or have been applying for (applicants). I used archival data provided by Hogan
Assessment Systems, and respondents were either applicants (N=1073) or incumbents (N=793)
within the managerial job family. All respondents had taken the Hogan Personality Inventory
(HPI), the Hogan Development Survey (HDS), the Motives, Values, and Preferences Inventory
(MVPI), and the Hogan Business Reasoning Inventory (HBRI). I used the method of mixedmodel
item response theory with covariates (MMI-IRT-C) and the statistical software Latent
Gold to estimate latent classes of respondents on the HPI items. To isolate the latent classes, I
entered HBRI's raw scores and the assessment reason (applicants or incumbent) as covariates
and used the items of each HPI's main scale as observed indicators of these classes. I extracted
between two and four latent classes of respondents for each of the seven HPI main scales. Using
various indicators of faking such as significantly more applicants than incumbents within a latent
class, higher HPI scale scores for applicants, decreased internal reliabilities, and very low
difficulty parameters, I identified and categorized three groups of respondents – honest, standard
faking, and a third group which I tentatively called deceptive faking. Although the deceptive
faking group represented the most intelligent respondents, their HPI main scale scores were not
significantly different than honest respondents' scores, whereas standard faking respondents'
scores were significantly higher than honest respondents' scores except for the Sociability scale.
In terms of maladaptive personality, which was explored through the HDS, contrary to
hypothesized, (open full item for complete abstract)
Committee: Michael Zickar Ph.D. (Advisor); Kenneth Borland Ph.D. (Other); Eric Dubow Ph.D. (Committee Member); Samuel McAbee Ph.D. (Committee Member)
Subjects: Personality Psychology; Psychological Tests; Psychology