Business Commons^™

The Over-Claiming Technique: Measuring Self-Enhancement Independent Of Ability, Delroy L. Paulhus, Peter D. Harms, M. Nadine Bruce, Daria C. Lysy

Leadership Institute: Faculty Publications

Overclaiming is a concrete operationalization of self-enhancement based on respondents’ ratings of their knowledge of various persons, events, products, and so on. Because 20% of the items are nonexistent, responses can be analyzed with signal detection formulas to index both response bias (over-claiming) and accuracy (knowledge). Study 1 demonstrated convergence of over-claiming with alternative measures of self-enhancement but independence from cognitive ability. In Studies 2–3, the validity of the overclaiming index held even when respondents were (a) warned about the foils or (b) asked to fake good. Study 3 also showed the utility of the over-claiming index for diagnosing faking. …