The present study examined whether an internal procedure for assessing the scalability of the response patterns, based on item response theory (IRT), can detect deliberate dissimulation (faking good) in the Extraversion, Neuroticism, and Psychoticism scale scores of the Eysenck Personality Questionnaire Revised. The procedure is compared to the traditional approaches, which use the Lie and the Social Desirability (SD) scales. A data set was analyzed in which participants were either administered the measures in standard conditions or given special instructions to fake good. The results showed that the IRT-based measures were not powerful enough to detect dissimulation, whereas the Lie and SD scales performed much better.
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