Social Desirability Bias

Social-desirability bias is a type of response bias in survey and self-report research in which respondents answer questions in a way they believe will be viewed favorably by others, typically by over-reporting behaviors and attitudes that are socially approved of and under-reporting ones that are socially disapproved of, which can distort both the accuracy of individual responses and the conclusions drawn from aggregated survey data. The psychologist Allen Edwards helped establish the concept in a 1953 study, showing that personality trait descriptions independently rated as more socially desirable tended to be endorsed by respondents at highly correlated rates across different groups, raising the concern that some self-report measures may capture how desirable a trait sounds more than they capture the trait itself.