When Winning is Everything : The Relationship between Competitive Worldviews and Job Applicant Faking

Job applicant faking, that is, consciously misrepresenting information during the selection process, is ubiquitous and a threat for the usefulness of various selection tools. Understanding antecedents of faking is thus of uttermost importance. Recent theories of faking highlight the central role of various forms of competition, for understanding why faking occurs. Drawing on these theories, we suggest that the more applicants adhere to competitive worldviews (CWs), that is, the more they believe that the social world is a competitive, Darwinian-type of struggle over scarce resources, the more likely they are to fake in employment interviews. We tested our hypothesis in three independent studies that were conducted in five different countries. Results show that CWs are strongly associated with faking, independently of job applicants' cultural and economic context. More specifically, applicants' CWs explain faking intentions and self-reported past faking above and beyond the Dark Triad of personality (Study 1), competitiveness and the six facets of conscientiousness (Study 2). Also, when faking is measured using a response randomization technique to control for social-desirability, faking is more prevalent among applicants with strong vs less strong CWs (Study 3). Taken together, this research demonstrates that competition is indeed strongly associated with undesirable applicant behaviors