Perceived ability to deceive and incremental prediction in pre-employment personality testing

Personality tests now play an important role in pre-employment testing. However, faking, or purposefully distorting personality test responses, is a long-standing concern in this venue. The purpose of this research was to create and evaluate a measure, the Perceived Ability to Deceive scale (PAID), to help better understand individual differences related to faking. PAID demonstrated evidence of reliability and discriminant validity. Moreover, we tested whether PAID could significantly add to the prediction of a workplace criterion in personnel selection settings. As hypothesized, PAID significantly predicted incremental variance in Counterproductive Work Behavior (CWB) beyond Conscientiousness, Agreeableness, Emotional Stability, and Honesty-Humility. Overall, our results suggested that PAID is distinct from other faking-related measures and may provide new insights into the process of faking in pre-employment personality testing. (C) 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.