The impact of psychopathy and warnings on faking behavior: A multisaturation perspective

Evidence suggests that individuals can and do present themselves positively on personality assessments when motivated to do so. This faking can reduce the validity of personality assessments and is of special concern in high stakes situations where critical decisions are being made at least partially on personality scores (e.g., personnel selection). In the current study, we take a multisaturation perspective of faking, and examine how psychopathy might be related to faking on normal range personality traits measured using single-stimulus or forced-choice personality assessments in a simulated selection context. To examine whether warnings interacted with psychopathy in predicting faking behavior, we included a warning condition. Findings suggest that faking on the single-stimulus personality assessment was more affected by elevated psychopathy such that those higher in psychopathy were more likely to fake than those lower in psychopathy, however psychopathy was also associated with faking behavior on the forced choice measure. This may result in an unintentional bias toward selecting employees with higher psychopathy when evaluating candidates with normal range personality assessments. Warning condition did not play a significant role either as a main effect or in interaction with psychopathy.