Understanding, detecting, and deterring faking on interest inventories

Abstract

Three recent meta-analyses have found that interests, regardless of scoring method (e.g., summative or congruence) are valid predictors of performance in employment contexts. As these inventories gain popularity as a prehire assessment, it is important to understand whether interest assessments are susceptible to faking (i.e., applicant response distortion) similar to how personality assessments are. Thus, the purpose of this study was to investigate whether interest inventories are susceptible to faking and whether faking can be detected and prevented using similar methods as what is commonly used for faking of personality assessments. Measures of forced-choice and single-stimulus interests, personality, general mental ability (GMA), and impression management (IM) were collected from 236 participants across honest and faked instructions. Findings suggest that individuals were capable of faking interest inventories, but surprisingly, the effect did not vary greatly as a function of format or scoring method. Further, GMA was not strongly related to faking interests, whereas faking of personality scales was. In efforts to detect interest faking, IM scores outperformed covariances indices in distinguishing between honest and faked scores.