Characteristics Of Social Desirability

Social Desirability as a Person Characteristic
Early on in the conceptualization of social desirability, there was recognition that culture was important in classifying opinions and behaviors as desirable or not. Crowne and Marlowe (1964) suggested that socially desirable responding was motivated by "the need of subjects to respond in culturally sanctioned ways" in order to obtain social approval. Yet, cultural variation in social desirability and the possible impact of differential social desirability on cross-cultural surveys have never been seriously examined. We know from cross-cultural work that there are both universals and cultural specifics in social behavior. Some norms that have obvious implications for survey behavior, such as the

Persons coming from more influential groups in society or from more influential countries tend to show lower scores on social desirability. In the previous section it was found that cultures do not seem to differ greatly in what is seen as desirable behavior. A combination of these results leads us to conclude that social desirability is an important source of cross-cultural score differences and that it can be fairly adequately measured in a cross-cultural framework. The psychological meaning is less clear-cut; there is some disagreement in the literature as to whether social desirability is "mere response editing" or is associated with various other psychological traits, such as agreeableness and need for affiliation. Yet, even within the latter view, it is important to take the role of social desirability into account in cross-cultural studies, as it constitutes an important source of score differences. It is probably the most common alternative explanation of country differences in survey research and deserves to be treated accordingly (e.g., by administering a measure of social