A Plea for Process in Personality Prevarication

We make a series recommendations for focusing research on personality test faking. Overall we suggest that a focus on the response process test takers go through will accelerate our understanding of faking behavior. We argue that the decision making process for faking must be simple and dependent on a modest set of decision rules or heuristics. The set of heuristics used by any given test taker will, in turn, be the result of test taker goals and situational press. By focusing in on what the test taker is doing we will avoid adopting the wrong frame of reference and, hopefully, make ever more rapid progress.