The fakeability of the PEN was tested experimentally in 108 college students using instructional sets of best impression (social desirability), worst impression (psychiatrically ill) and normal instructions. The response set most important to the invalidity of the PEN – the best impression set – had significant effects only on neuroticism (N) and lie scores. It was suggested that this and previous work have identified N as being particularly susceptible to social desirability responding, and that further psychometric work on this dimension may be in order. The ‘psychiatrically ill’ set significantly influenced all scales, in the direction of increased psychoticism, neuroticism and introversion. Significant effects of instructions on scale reliabilities were also obtained for the psychoticism (P) and lie scales. Many of the reliability effects could be attributed to the low P reliability on this sample. Caveats to the present findings were considered, and further research at the item level was proposed.
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Farley et al. (1976) studied this question.