Accounting for the Evaluative Factor in Self-Ratings Provides a More Accurate Estimate of the Relationship Between Personality Traits and Well-Being
Social desirability may cause spurious relations in self-rating measures. The present study sought to disentangle socially desirable responding and content in the relation between measures of personality traits and well-being. Social desirability was operationalized as the evaluative factor (the tendency to react to evaluative content in questionnaire items). We collected self- and peer-ratings of personality and self-ratings of well-being from 219 participants. The evaluative factor in personality self-ratings significantly predicted well-being and explained more variance than all Big Five traits combined. The evaluative factor in personality peer-ratings had no unique relation to well-being. These findings suggest that previous estimates of the relationship between personality traits and well-being have generally been exaggerated. Different methods of accounting for social desirability are discussed.
Publisher URL: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S009265662100057X
DOI: 10.1016/j.jrp.2021.104120
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