The influence of the situational and cognitive factors on the response style on personality questionnaires in the real-life selection

Abstract

The aim of this study was to find out if there were any interactive effect between the situational factors (four levels of competitiveness) and the subjects’ Intelligence on the style of responding on personality questionnaires (EPQ and ANSIE). The four levels of competitiveness were manipulated in the real-life faculty entrance exam situation. The results indicated that the manipulation caused different average results in different situations on all the scales except the E scale, but also that there were no interactions between situational and cognitive factors that could have influenced the response style. The only significant and interpretable difference between high and low groups according to inteligence was registered on the L scale in the extremely competitive situation, indicating that more intelligent subjects tended to make their results lower, when compared to less intelligent subjects. Such a response set might »mask« the eventual distortion of their results on other questionnaire scales. These results contribute to the criticism of the construct of generalized distortion of responses, which is based on the L scale results.