Exploring the Role of Social Desirability in Situational Judgment Tests

We explore the role of social desirability in explaining how individuals respond to situational judgment test (SJT) items. We argue that SJTs can be conceptualized as measuring the knowledge of socially desirable behavior or norms in a situation or context. Consensus-scored SJTs consistently correlated positively with general mental ability, knowledge of social norms, and socially desirable traits in samples of undergraduate students and adults from an online crowdsourcing platform regardless of test content. We argue that consensus scored SJTs measure an understanding of socially normative or desirable behavior which is distinct from general mental ability or the general factor of personality. Additionally, we found that trait-focused SJTs function differently compared to traditional, skill-based SJTs when expert-based scoring is used. Trait-focused SJTs contain response option sets which feature differing levels of trait expression, social desirability, and effectiveness. This results in greater variability in responding due to differences in context (e.g., different instructions or organizational setting) and in greater potential for multiple scoring keys with differing patterns of convergent validity. We hope that our findings help bring attention to the role of social desirability when studying SJTs and encourage more emphasis on the characteristics of response options to complement prior research focused on the situational stems.