Provide some evidence for the existence of distortion in personal history data.

Question

What will be an ideal response?

Answer 1

The “sweetening” of résumés is not uncommon, and one study reported that 20–25% of all résumés and job applications include at least one major fabrication (LoPresto, Mitcham, & Ripley, 1986). The extent of self-reported distortion was found to be even higher when data were collected using the randomized-response technique, which absolutely guarantees response anonymity and thereby allows for more honest self-reports (Donovan, Dwight, & Hurtz, 2003).
A study in which participants were instructed to “answer questions in such a way as to make you look as good an applicant as possible” and to “answer questions as honestly as possible” resulted in scores almost two standard deviations higher for the “fake good” condition (McFarland & Ryan, 2000). In fact, the difference between the “fake good” and the “honest” experimental conditions was larger for a biodata inventory than for other measures including personality traits such as extraversion, openness to experience, and agreeableness. In addition, individuals differed in the extent to which they were able to fake (as measured by the difference between individual’s scores in the “fake good” and “honest” conditions). So, if they want to, individuals can distort their responses, but some people are more able than others to do so.