Abstract
48 objective personality items were chosen to represent the entire social desirability continuum and were heterogeneous and non-pathological in content. They were rated by 50 males and 50 females for how socially desirable it is to ask persons to respond to them regardless of the responses that might be elicited (SD-?); and by a separate sample of 97 males and 99 females for how much of an invasion of privacy it constitutes to have to endorse them (IP). The correlations between SD-? ratings and conventional social desirability scale values (SDSV) and probabilities of endorsement (P(T)) ranged from .87 to .90. The correlations between IP and SDSV and P(T) ranged from .64 to .74. This evidence indicates that objective personality items are perceived as invasions of privacy almost exclusively to the extent that endorsement of an item is judged to be socially undesirable, even when endorsement is explicitly not in question.
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