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ABSTRACT
Unlike prior research that treats social-desirability bias (SDB) as measure contamination, the present research asserts that significant associations between measures of SDB and value self-reports are evidence of measure validity. The degree to which value self-reports are influenced by SDB also reflects the relative importance of values within a culture. Values that are most important have the greatest self-presentational implications and therefore should be most affected by SDB. Moreover, differences between raw and SDBcorrected value self-reports indicate the extent to which values are personal (i.e., private) or public in nature. The research is based on two national samples of American adults 18 years of age and older. Implications for research on values are discussed. (C) 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
The tendency of respondents to provide socially desirable answers is the most studied form of response bias in the social sciences (cf. Paulhus, 1991). Social-desirability bias (SDB) has been found to affect the measurement of personality variables (e.g., Mick, 1996), attitudes (e.g., Fisher, 1993), and self-reported behaviors (e.g., Mensch & Kandel, 1988). Moreover, SDB effects are complex and have the potential to attenuate, inflate, or moderate variable relationships depending on the measures being used and the model under consideration (for a review see Zerbe & Paulhus, 1987). Hence, SDB research can be found in psychology (e.g., Maher, 1978; Paulhus, 1984; Robinette, 1991; Wagner, Hilsenroth, & Sivec, 1990); marketing (e.g., Steele, 1964); organizational behavior (e.g., Zerbe & Paulhus, 1987); economics (e.g., Kilpatrick, 1957); sociology (e.g., Simon & Simon, 1975); education (e.g., Peltier & Walsh, 1990) and virtually every other area that relies on self-report measures.
The extent to which SDB adds nontrait variance to a measure is typically estimated by the correlation between the variable of interest and one or more SDB measures. In consumer research, for example, the Marlowe-Crowne Social Desirability (MCSD) scale (Crowne & Marlowe, 1960; 1964) has been used to assess SDB in measures of materialism (e.g., Richins & Dawson, 1992), values (Beatty, Kahle, Homer, & Misra, 1985), and compulsive buying (Mick, 1996). If a significant SDB effect occurs, researchers typically try to remove the bias component or ignore it because the contamination is trivial (for a review of methods see Paulhus, 1991). If no significant association between the variable...