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The use of subtle items in detecting deception.

S E Dannenbaum¹, R I Lanyon

¹Arizona State University, Tempe, USA.

Journal of Personality Assessment

|January 1, 1993

Summary

When faking psychopathology on the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI), individuals score lower on subtle subscales. This occurs because misleading item content, not true psychopathology, influences responses, aiding deception detection.

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Area of Science:

Psychological assessment
Psychometrics
Deception detection

Background:

Subtle subscales on the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI) paradoxically yield lower scores when individuals attempt to fake psychopathology.
This phenomenon is hypothesized to stem from the subtle items' face validity contradicting their keyed direction for psychopathology.

Purpose of the Study:

To investigate why subtle MMPI subscale scores decrease when subjects feign psychopathology.
To determine if misleading item face validity influences faking-bad responses.

Main Methods:

Three groups of 80 undergraduates completed the MMPI under standard, faking-good, or faking-bad conditions.
Analysis focused on scores of subjects instructed to fake psychopathology compared to a control group.
Specific attention was given to responses on the 100 most subtle items.

Main Results:

Subjects instructed to fake psychopathology (faking-bad group) scored significantly lower on subtle MMPI items compared to the regular group.
This effect was primarily driven by responses to 73 items with misleading face validity for psychopathology.
The findings support the hypothesis that deceptive individuals respond to item content rather than true psychopathology.

Conclusions:

The study confirms that lower scores on MMPI subtle subscales during faking-bad conditions are linked to misleading item face validity.
These findings underscore the utility of subtle MMPI items in identifying deceptive response sets.
The results align with existing research on the effectiveness of subtle items in deception detection.

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