From personality types to social labels: the impact of using MBTI on social anxiety among Chinese youth

Introduction

As the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) gains popularity among Chinese young people, it has undergone a gradual transition from being perceived as a personality assessment tool to being regarded as a social label. The objective of this study was to ascertain whether the use of the MBTI as a social label has an impact on social anxiety among Chinese youth groups.

Methods

A questionnaire survey was conducted on social media platforms to recruit Chinese youth aged 18 to 35. A total of 247 males and 222 females participated in the study, and the data was analyzed quantitatively using SPSS software and the Process macro plugin.

Results

The study found no strong correlation between MBTI as a social label and social anxiety. Moreover, this study introduced ego identity, belonging, and impression management as mediating variables and found that, under the influence of ego identity and impression management, the use of MBTI has a significant impact on social anxiety.

Discussion

The research reveals the complex role of MBTI among Chinese youth and provides a new perspective for understanding the impact of online social labels on the mental health of youth groups. Of course, this study also has limitations in terms of sample size and variable control. Future research should expand the sample size, introduce more potential influencing factors, and further validate and expand the existing conclusions.

Can People With Higher Versus Lower Scores on Impression Management or Self-Monitoring Be Identified Through Different Traces Under Faking?

According to faking models, personality variables and faking are related. Most prominently, people's tendency to try to make an appropriate impression (impression management; IM) and their tendency to adjust the impression they make (self-monitoring; SM) have been suggested to be associated with faking. Nevertheless, empirical findings connecting these personality variables to faking have been contradictory, partly because different studies have given individuals different tests to fake and different faking directions (to fake low vs. high scores). Importantly, whereas past research has focused on faking by examining test scores, recent advances have suggested that the faking process could be better understood by analyzing individuals' responses at the item level (response pattern). Using machine learning (elastic net and random forest regression), we reanalyzed a data set (N = 260) to investigate whether individuals' faked response patterns on extraversion (features; i.e., input variables) could reveal their IM and SM scores. We found that individuals had similar response patterns when they faked, irrespective of their IM scores (excluding the faking of high scores when random forest regression was used). Elastic net and random forest regression converged in revealing that individuals higher on SM differed from individuals lower on SM in how they faked. Thus, response patterns were able to reveal individuals' SM, but not IM. Feature importance analyses showed that whereas some items were faked differently by individuals with higher versus lower SM scores, others were faked similarly. Our results imply that analyses of response patterns offer valuable new insights into the faking process.

Trait Boredom as a Lack of Agency: A Theoretical Model and a New Assessment Tool

Trait boredom plays a significant role in well-being. However, this construct suffers from conceptual ambiguity and measurement problems. The aim of this study was to propose a comprehensive theory and a strong assessment tool to address these limitations. We defined trait boredom as the frequent experience of state boredom resulting from a chronic lack of agency. We developed a six-item self-report scale of the tendency to often experience boredom. Results confirmed a uni-dimensional scale with strong psychometric properties, including adequate internal consistency (ω = .84-.93), interindividual stability (69.04% of variance accounted by a trait factor), and acceptable model fit (CFI = .977-.998, TLI = .962-.997, RMSEA = .025-.090, SRMR = .014-.029). Results confirmed the validity of the scale by showing its associations with related measures. Our findings provide clarity on trait boredom and a strong, new measure to be used in future work.

Autistic adults' inclination to lie in everyday situations

LAY ABSTRACT

Differences in social communication and understanding others' mental states may mean that autistic adults are less likely to deceive others than non-autistic individuals. We investigated whether autistic and non-autistic adults differ in their inclination to lie and which psychological factors are involved in the inclination to lie. We found that autistic and non-autistic groups reported a similar inclination to lie, and the extent to which participants viewed lying as acceptable helped to explain their inclination to deceive others. However, the other underlying psychological factors associated with deception inclination differed between autistic and non-autistic groups. Autistic adults' belief about their ability to lie and also how quickly they could lie helped to explain whether they were more or less inclined to lie. For non-autistic adults, their memory and ability to understand others' mental states helped to explain their lie inclination. We discuss these findings and recommend areas for future research.

Impression management in daily life: an experience sampling test for the expression of impression management as interpersonally oriented self-control

Impression management (IM) scales (often called lie or social desirability scales) have long been applied as validity scales in assessment processes. Recent developments have indicated that these scales measure a substantive personality predisposition and not response bias, but the nature of the disposition is disputable. According to the 'interpersonally oriented self-control' approach, IM is associated with high self-control exerted mainly in public social contexts to facilitate adaptation. Supported in laboratory settings, this approach has not been tested in real-life dynamics. In the present experience sampling study, participants reported 3 times a day (10 days) about their social condition (alone/'with others') and their level of self-control. Results revealed that IM was associated with stronger self-control when with other people than when alone. Comparable reactions to public social context were not found for self-deception enhancement, trait self-control, or agreeableness, marking this a unique aspect of IM. The findings further stress the need to reconsider the use of IM scales for validity purposes in assessment processes.

Autonomy-supportive agents: whose support matters most, and how does it unfold in the workplace?

Managers and colleagues satisfy others' need for autonomy, but employees can also satisfy their own need by engaging in autonomy crafting practices. Although all three sources of autonomy support can benefit employee outcomes, they may not be equally beneficial. Furthermore, their benefits may not be straightforward, but rather a psychological process unfolding. To test these assumptions, the aim of the present study was twofold: to determine whether the different sources of support explained significantly different amounts of variance in autonomy satisfaction when compared and to understand the psychological process through which autonomy support from three sources influenced performance, more specifically, whether autonomy support indirectly affected performance through perceived autonomy satisfaction and work engagement in serial. In a sample of 278 employees, autonomy support from others (especially managers) and autonomy crafting played a role in autonomy satisfaction. Furthermore, the results indicated that autonomy support was associated with performance through its serial associations with autonomy satisfaction and work engagement. The results emphasized the importance of autonomy support for performance, enabling organizations to proactively design interventions to improve engagement and performance.

Supplementary Information

The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s12144-022-03550-9.

The Impact of Our Personality on Others: The Lithuanian Comprehensive Lexical Taxonomy of Social Effects

Social effects represent the psychological (emotional, cognitive, and motivational) reactions evoked in other people by the expression of traits in behavior and emotion. From the transactional view on personality, studying the psycholexical structures of social effects can help to discover unique vs. common thought and behavior patterns, affects, and motivations, which are primarily related to personality dispositions. Thus, we developed the comprehensive taxonomy of social effects following the principles of the psycholexical approach. In the first study, two judges selected 9,625 person-descriptive terms—adjectives, type-nouns, attribute-nouns, and participles—from the Dictionary of the Standard Lithuanian Language. In the second study, six judges classified all the selected descriptors using German psycholexical methodology. Finally, a principal component analysis was performed, followed by varimax rotation for the 208 social-effect descriptors, separately for ipsatized self-ratings and observer-ratings from 203 to 204 Lithuanian students, respectively. We found out that the five-component solution was the best fit for self-ratings, whereas for observer-ratings it was a four-component structure. In this article, we present the results from the factor analyses and discuss our findings in the context of previous studies, as well as cross-language personality models.

Are social desirability scales desirable? A meta-analytic test of the validity of social desirability scales in the context of prosocial behavior

Social desirability (SD) scales have been used for decades in psychology and beyond. These scales are sought to measure individuals' tendencies to present themselves overly positive in self-reports, thus allowing to control for SD biases. However, research increasingly questions the validity of SD scales, proposing that SD scales measure substantive trait characteristics rather than response bias. To provide a large-scale empirical test of the validity of SD scales, we conducted a meta-analysis (k = 41; N = 8980) on the relation between SD scale scores and prosocial behavior in economic games (where acting in a prosocial manner is highly socially desirable). If SD scales measure what they are supposed to (namely, SD bias), they should be negatively linked to prosocial behavior; if SD scales measure socially desirable traits, they should be positively linked to prosocial behavior. Unlike both possibilities, the meta-analytic correlation between SD scores and prosocial behavior was close to zero, suggesting that SD scales neither clearly measure bias nor substantive traits. This conclusion was also supported by moderation analyses considering differences in the implementation of games and the SD scales used. The results further question the validity of SD scales with the implication that scholars and practitioners should refrain from using them.

Do Social Desirability Scales Measure Dishonesty?

Abstract. Social Desirability (SD) scales are sometimes treated, by researchers, as measures of dishonesty and, by practitioners, as indicators of faking on self-report assessments in high-stakes settings, such as personnel selection. Applying SD scales to measure dishonesty or faking, however, remains a point of contention among the scientific community. This two-part study investigated if SD scales, with a True/ False response format, are valid for these purposes. Initially, 46 participants completed an SD scale and 12 personality items while under instruction to “think aloud”, that is, to verbalize all the thoughts they had. These spoken thoughts were recorded and transcribed. Next, 175 judges rated the participants’ honesty in relation to each SD item, based on the participants’ transcribed spoken thoughts and their selected response to the item. The results showed that responses keyed as “socially desirable responding” were judged as significantly less honest than those not keyed as such. However, the effect size was very small, and the socially desirable responses were still being judged as somewhat honest overall. Further, participants’ SD scale sum scores were not related to the judges’ ratings of participant honesty on the personality items. Thus, overall, SD scales appear to be a poor measure of dishonesty.

Faking Detection Improved: Adopting a Likert Item Response Process Tree Model

With the increasing popularity of noncognitive inventories in personnel selection, organizations typically wish to be able to tell when a job applicant purposefully manufactures a favorable impression. Past faking research has primarily focused on how to reduce faking via instrument design, warnings, and statistical corrections for faking. This article took a new approach by examining the effects of faking (experimentally manipulated and contextually driven) on response processes. We modified a recently introduced item response theory tree modeling procedure, the three-process model, to identify faking in two studies. Study 1 examined self-reported vocational interest assessment responses using an induced faking experimental design. Study 2 examined self-reported personality assessment responses when some people were in a high-stakes situation (i.e., selection). Across the two studies, individuals instructed or expected to fake were found to engage in more extreme responding. By identifying the underlying differences between fakers and honest respondents, the new approach improves our understanding of faking. Percentage cutoffs based on extreme responding produced a faker classification precision of 85% on average.

Value priorities, impression management and self-deceptive enhancement: Once again, much substance and a little bit of style

The connection between self-reported personal values and socially desirable responding in social psychology has been backed up by little empirical evidence. This study expands upon the pioneering work carried out by Schwartz and colleagues by analyzing the relationship between values and social desirability through the use of different self-report measures of values and by considering the multidimensional nature of social desirability. The study involved 224 Italian respondents (63.4% female, mean age = 22.39, SD = 2.47) who completed a questionnaire. Results confirmed Schwartz et al.'s previous findings supporting the substantive hypothesis. Specifically, impression management was more related to values highlighting the importance of social harmony (i.e., conservation and self-transcendence) rather than to those characterized by a personal focus (i.e., openness to change and self-enhancement). However, a different pattern of connection was found for self-deceptive enhancement. This study addresses how to deal with social desirability in research into personal values.

Trusting Virtual Agents

We present artificial intelligent (AI) agents that act as interviewers to engage with a user in a text-based conversation and automatically infer the user's personality traits. We investigate how the personality of an AI interviewer and the inferred personality of a user influences the user's trust in the AI interviewer from two perspectives: the user's willingness to confide in and listen to an AI interviewer. We have developed two AI interviewers with distinct personalities and deployed them in a series of real-world events. We present findings from four such deployments involving 1,280 users, including 606 actual job applicants. Notably, users are more willing to confide in and listen to an AI interviewer with a serious, assertive personality in a high-stakes job interview. Moreover, users’ personality traits, inferred from their chat text, along with interview context, influence their perception of and their willingness to confide in and listen to an AI interviewer. Finally, we discuss the design implications of our work on building hyper-personalized, intelligent agents.

Social Desirability Bias Against Admitting Anger: Bias in the Test-Taker or Bias in the Test?

The veracity of self-report is often questioned, especially in anger, which is particularly susceptible to social desirability bias (SDB). However, could tests of SDB be themselves susceptible to bias? This study aimed to replicate the inverse correlation between a common test of SDB and a test of anger, to deconstruct this relationship according to anger-related versus non-anger-related items, and to reevaluate factor structure and reliability of the SDB test. More than 200 students were administered the Marlowe-Crowne Social Desirability Scale Short Version [M-C1(10)] and the Anger Parameters Scale (APS). Results confirmed that anger and SDB scores were significantly and inversely correlated. This intercorrelation became nonsignificant when the 4 anger-related items were omitted from the M-C1(10). Confirmatory factor analyses showed excellent fit for a model comprising anger items of the M-C1(10) but not for models of the entire instrument or nonanger items. The first model also attained high internal consistency. Thus, the significant negative correlation between anger and SDB is attributable to 4 M-C1(10) anger items, for which low ratings are automatically scored as high SDB; this stems from a tenuous assumption that low anger reports are invariably biased. The SDB test risks false positives of faking good and should be used with caution.

What Is Honesty? Laypersons Interpret High Lie Scale Scores as Reflecting Intentional Dishonesty: Rejoinder to de Vries et al.’s (2017) Comment on Feldman et al. (2017)

Scholars have recently been questioning the original premise of lie scales as measuring dishonesty for social desirability, with some even claiming that lie scales may in fact represent higher honesty (e.g., de Vries et al., 2017 commentary on Feldman, Lian, Kosinski, & Stillwell, 2017). In a preregistered experiment, I examined the relationship between lie scales and honesty by directly assessing laypersons’ perceptions of honesty reflected in lie scales. Overall, laypersons perceived higher lie scale scores as reflecting higher dishonesty and higher lie scale scorers as more intentionally dishonest and socially sensitive, endorsing a negative (and rejecting a positive) relationship between lie scales and honesty. These findings provide empirical support for lie scales as capturing dishonesty. I discuss implications and possible directions for addressing the complexity inherent in the construct of honesty and the need for an integration of the seemingly contradictory findings to advance the debate regarding lie scales and honesty.

Examining the accuracy of students' self-reported academic grades from a correlational and a discrepancy perspective: Evidence from a longitudinal study

The present longitudinal study examined the reliability of self-reported academic grades across three phases in four subject domains for a sample of 916 high-school students. Self-reported grades were found to be highly positively correlated with actual grades in all academic subjects and across grades 9 to 11 underscoring the reliability of self-reported grades as an achievement indicator. Reliability of self-reported grades was found to differ across subject areas (e.g., mathematics self-reports more reliable than language studies), with a slight yet consistent tendency to over-report achievement levels also observed across grade levels and academic subjects. Overall, the absolute value of over- and underreporting was low and these patterns were not found to differ between mathematics and verbal subjects. In sum, study findings demonstrate the consistent predictive utility of students' self-reported achievement across grade levels and subject areas with the observed tendency to over-report academic grades and slight differences between domains nonetheless warranting consideration in future education research.

Struggling to be liked: The prospective effect of trait self-control on social desirability and the moderating role of agreeableness

Drawing from the literature on the interpersonal functions of self-control, we examined longitudinal associations between trait self-control and social desirability, using a survey of the general population in the Netherlands. Trait self-control at baseline was positively associated with social desirability at a follow-up, even when controlling for prior levels of social desirability. That is, high self-control contributed to individuals' tendency to give socially desirable responses in self-reports. This effect was moderated by individual differences in agreeableness. Highly agreeable individuals were more likely to "use" their self-regulatory resources to respond in a socially desirable manner, compared to less agreeable individuals, suggesting that individuals might use self-regulatory resources in a way consistent with the motivational bases of their personality.

Impression management and achievement motivation: Investigating substantive links

In this research, we investigate impression management (IM) as a substantive personality variable by linking it to differentiated achievement motivation constructs, namely achievement motives (workmastery, competitiveness, fear of failure) and achievement goals (mastery-approach, mastery-avoidance, performance-approach, performance-avoidance). Study 1 revealed that IM was a positive predictor of workmastery and a negative predictor of competitiveness (with and without self-deceptive enhancement (SDE) controlled). Studies 2a and 2b revealed that IM was a positive predictor of mastery-approach goals and mastery-avoidance goals (without and, in Study 2b, with SDE controlled). These findings highlight the value of conceptualising and utilising IM as a personality variable in its own right and shed light on the nature of the achievement motive and achievement goal constructs.

The Selfish Side of Self–Control

Self–control is a powerful tool that promotes goal pursuit by helping individuals curb personal desires, follow norms, and adopt rational thinking. In interdependent social contexts, the socially acceptable (i.e. normative) and rational approach to secure long–term goals is prosocial behaviour. Consistent with that, much research associates self–control with prosociality. The present research demonstrates that when norm salience is reduced (i.e. social relations are no longer interdependent), high self–control leads to more selfish behaviour when it is economically rational. In three studies, participants were asked to allocate an endowment between themselves and another person (one–round, zero–sum version of the dictator game), facing a conflict between a socially normative and an economically rational approach. Across the studies, norm salience was manipulated [through manipulation of social context (private/public; Studies 1 and 2), measurement of social desirability (Studies 1 and 3), and measurement (Study 2) and manipulation (Study 3) of social power] such that some participants experienced low normative pressure. Findings showed that among individuals in a low normative pressure context, self–control led to economically rational, yet selfish, behaviour. The findings highlight the role of self–control in regulating behaviour so as to maximize situational adaptation. Copyright © 2014 European Association of Personality Psychology