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Social desirability bias represents tendency to present oneself in a socially desirable or positive manner to others. As there is high possibility of faking good or bad in objective psychological tools many psychologists rely more on projective psychological assessment to identify any personality pathology or clinical symptoms with the believe that projective tools are protected from social desirability biasness, but there is lack of research to pin point this belief. In the present study authors tried to examine whether more 'socially accepted role- response' can affect subject's responsiveness to Rorschach cards. 60 college students were divided equally in 3 different instructional groups randomly and were presented with same set of Rorschach responses to identify. Three groups were informed that responses were given by a convicted criminal, a talented student and a severe mental patient respectively. Responses included contents like popular, sexual, aggression, anatomical, isolate etc. Comparison of three instructions failed to find any significant association of instructional set and identification of Rorschach response to suggest minimum possibility of social desirability biasness in Rorschach.
Key words: Rorschach, social desirability
Over reporting, under reporting or rejection of particular response in psychological assessment have been discussed (Neeley and Cronley, 2004) as result of social desirability bias or conscious; unconscious censorship. Social desirability bias represents tendency to present oneself in a socially desirable or positive manner to others. Socially desirable responding (SDR) is most likely to occur in responses to socially sensitive questions (King and Brunner 2000). Psychologists have developed and validated scales to detect SDR. The most widely used example is the33-item Marlowe-Crowne Social Desirability Scale (MCSDS) (King and Brunner 2000; Crown and Marlowe, 1960).
Research designs that use a self-report format and measure constructs having high social influence appear to foster problems with socialdesirability bias (Neeley and Cronley, 2004). This is the reason different objective psychological tests (for example, Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory, Multiphasic Questionnaire; Eysenck Personality Questionnaire etc.) have incorporated reliability and validity checkups for examinee given responses to screen out desirable response pattern in test taking approach. But these tests are not free from its pitfall. For example, Kroger (1967) and Kroger and Turnbull (1970) manipulated social expectancies to indirectly induce college students to respond to several personality tests as either a...