>"Social desirability concerns can be seen as a special case of the threat of disclosure, involving a specific type of interpersonal consequence of revealing information in a survey—social disapproval. The literature on social desirability is voluminous, and it features divergent conceptualizations and operationalizations of the notion of socially desirable responding (DeMaio, 1984). One fundamental difference among the different approaches lies in whether they treat socially desirable responding as a stable personality characteristic or a temporary social strategy (DeMaio, 1984). The view that socially desirable responding is, at least in part, a personality trait underlies psychologists’ early attempts to develop various social desirability scales. Though some of these efforts (e.g., Edwards, 1957; Philips & Clancy, 1970, 1972) recognize the possibility that social desirability is a property of the items rather than (or as well as) of the respondents, many of them treat socially desirable responding as a stable personality characteristic (e.g., Crowne & Marlowe, 1964; Schuessler, Hittle, & Cardascia, 1978). By contrast, survey researchers have tended to view socially desirable responding as a response strategy reflecting the sensitivity of specific items for specific individuals; thus, Sudman and Bradburn (1974) had interviewers rate the social desirability of potential answers to specific survey questions. > >Paulhus’s (2002) work encompasses both viewpoints, making a distinction between socially desirable responding as a response style (a bias that is “consistent across time and questionnaires”; Paulhus, 2002, p. 49) and as a response set (a short-lived bias “attributable to some temporary distraction or motivation”; Paulhus, 2002, p. 49). > >A general weakness with scales designed to measure socially desirable responding is that they lack “true” scores, making it difficult or impossible to distinguish among (a) respondents who are actually highly compliant with social norms, (b) those who have a sincere but inflated view of themselves, and (c) those who are deliberately trying to make a favorable impression by falsely reporting positive things about themselves"
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