Social desirability in integrity screening

What is social desirability?

Social desirability is the tendency of respondents to give answers that are socially acceptable rather than truthful. In a hiring context, this isn't a moral failing — it's a rational strategy. Almost everyone does it to some degree.

The problem arises when an instrument has no mechanism to detect social desirability. Then every candidate comes out as sincere, engaged, and integrity-rich. The report says nothing useful.

How Verity measures it

Verity treats social desirability as its own domain (internal domain-ID 5) with a fixed set of items explicitly designed to detect desirable answering behaviour. Examples of such items are statements so extremely positive that an honest respondent would normally not agree with them — whoever agrees with them is signalling that the report is being filled in "for show".

The score on this domain is then included on the report as a reliability indicator. Three levels:

• Low score — reliable. The report may be interpreted normally.
• Moderate score — moderately reliable. A yellow caution notice is shown on the report.
• High score — unreliable. A red alarm bar appears above the summary. Other domain scores are no longer interpretable — they likely measure how the candidate wants to be seen, not who the candidate is.

Why it matters more than raw scores

In integrity screening, a report is only as reliable as its weakest signal. A candidate with an 85% score on "trustworthiness" and a high social-desirability score is in fact suspicious, not trustworthy. The combination points to someone who completed the test strategically.

Verity combines social desirability with two other independent reliability signals — cross-comparison (the same question in different phrasings) and response-time analysis — into a single consolidated reliability judgement. Only when those three signals agree should a report be given the "green light".

What to do with a high social-desirability score

Don't reject automatically. Social desirability is not an integrity problem in itself — it's a measurement problem. Practical approach:

1. Discuss the report with the candidate. Ask specifically about items from the social-desirability domain. Often the real position emerges in conversation.
2. Combine with other sources: structured interview, references, prior work experience. No single tool — not even Verity — should ever be the sole source of a hiring decision.
3. Consider a second sitting with different instructions. Sometimes making it explicit that honest answers also yield a serious candidate helps.

Further reading

• Glossary — Social desirability
• Glossary — Cross-comparison
• Glossary — Response-time analysis