Association between social desirability and a brief measure of personality (15-item Big Five Inventory: BFI-15p)

This study examined whether the Big Five Personality Inventory–15p (BFI-15p) elicits socially desirable responding (SD), a potential source of response distortion. Participants were 296 scholarship-holding undergraduates (18–25 years) from a private Mexican university who completed the BFI-15p and the Socially Desirable Response Set–5 (SDRS-5) online. Winsorized Spearman correlations estimated monotonic associations between SD and BFI-15p dimension scores and item responses, and partial rank correlations examined BFI-15p inter-dimension correlations controlling for SD. All BFI-15p dimensions were significantly associated with SD, but magnitudes varied across traits. Agreeableness showed the strongest association (rho: 0.40), followed by Neuroticism (rho: −0.29). Openness, Conscientiousness, and Extraversion showed small correlations (rho ≈ 0.15–0.18). At the item level, SD-related responding was not uniform within dimensions with small SD correlations; instead, only specific items (e.g. trustworthiness, perseverance, aesthetic appreciation) showed detectable associations, suggesting greater susceptibility for evaluative content. Controlling for SD reduced correlations among Big Five dimensions, although standardized differences were trivial (q < 0.06), indicating limited SD-related inflation in trait interrelations. Overall, findings provide initial discriminant validity evidence for the BFI-15p and suggest that SD may differentially affect trait scores, particularly Agreeableness, although this pattern may be especially salient in scholarship recipients responding under evaluative conditions.