NCJ Number
138785
Journal
Journal of Addictions and Offender Counseling Volume: 13 Issue: 1 Dated: (October 1992) Pages: 23-32
Date Published
1992
Length
10 pages
Annotation
Data collected from a sample of 305 incarcerated male criminal offenders in an Arizona county jail were used to perform a detailed analysis of the content of measures of faking-good and faking-bad as related to deliberate deception in self-presentation. The authors hypothesized that there would be little, if any, overlap in item content.
Abstract
Universes of content for deceptive behavior were created using 259 items of 9 deception scales taken from common inventories. The results showed that, for incarcerated prisoners, item content related to faking-bad involved the endorsement of psychiatric symptoms including paranoid ideation, extreme anxiety, and depression. Item content related to faking-good involved the endorsement of highly desirable characteristics and the denial of normal, but less desirable, traits. When the study was replicated using a sample of 409 university students, fewer reliable factors appeared, probably because deception was not a salient issue for this sample. However, the limited results did support the finding of separate and distinct item content for faking-good and faking-bad behaviors. The authors contend that success at deception depends on the deceiver's knowledge, both factual and experiential, of the characteristics that are possessed by persons of the targeted type. 1 table and 17 references