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Applicant Faking On Personality Tests: Good Or Bad And Why Should We Care?, Robert P. Tett, Daniel V. Simonet

Personnel Assessment and Decisions

The unitarian understanding of construct validity holds that deliberate response distortion in completing self-report personality tests (i.e., faking) threatens trait-based inferences drawn from test scores. This “faking-is-bad” (FIB) perspective is being challenged by an emerging “faking-is-good” (FIG) position that condones or favors faking and its underlying attributes (e.g., social skill, ATIC) to the degree they contribute to predictor–criterion correlations and are job relevant. Based on the unitarian model of validity and relevant empirical evidence, we argue the FIG perspective is psychometrically flawed and counterproductive to personality-based selection targeting trait-based fit. Carrying forward both positions leads to variously dark futures for …