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How social desirability and acquiescence affect the age-personality relationship
Andreu Vigil-Colet1, Fabia Morales-Vives, Urbano Lorenzo-Seva
1Research Center for Behavior Assessment, Universitat Rovira i Virgili, Tarragona, Spain. andreu.vigil@urv.cat
Background:
Recent studies have suggested that the age-personality relationship may be partially explained by age-related changes in social desirability. In the present study, we analyze how age affects social desirability and acquiescence, and how they affect the age-personality relationship.
Method:
We used a specially designed personality test, which provides response bias and personality dimension scores independently of each other. We applied this test to a sample of 3773 individuals aged between 13 and 97 years old (49.69% female) and analyzed the effects of age, sex, and their interactions on response bias and personality dimensions.
Results:
Age affects social desirability and acquiescence, both of which increase with age, and this increase affects the age-personality relationship, especially for dimensions such as Agreeableness or Conscientiousness.
Conclusions:
The age-related differences found in self-reported personality measures might be partly attributable to age-related increases in response bias. Furthermore, the high scores of elderly people on response bias measures implies that the results of self-reports that do not incorporate any correction for response bias should be viewed with caution, especially when they are obtained in samples of people over 50 years old.
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