Self-report mental imagery and social desirable responding

The relationship between scores on self-report imagery questionnaires and sub-types of socially desirable responding was investigated across five papers. Paulhus (2002) has proposed a distinction between two forms of social desirable responding: the egoistic bias which is the tendency to claim positive social and intellectual qualities, and the moralistic bias which is the claiming of positive moral qualities. The research made use of the Balanced Inventory of Desirable Responding (BIDR; Paulhus, 2002) which has separate scales to measure both biases. The papers found the following: 1) ‘greater’ imagery ability was always associated with higher social desirable responding; 2) correlations with self-report imagery scales and egoism were always higher than those with moralism; 3) the magnitude of correlations between imagery scales and egoism was generally in the r= .20 to .35 range and so sometimes exceeded a r=.25 criterion for acceptability set by McKelvie (1994); 4) significant correlations between imagery properties and egoism were seen for scales measuring vividness of visual imagery and for some other visual properties of images such as ease of image generation; 5) the size of imagery scale–egoism correlations were themselves correlated positively with the extent to which participants rated imagery properties as measuring imagery ability and the extent to which the imagery property was desired; 6) the imagery scale–egoism correlations were of a similar size for imaging real world items and spatial ability test type items; and 7) the imagery scale–egoism correlations were largely independent of correlations with trait anxiety. The findings suggest that the self-report imagery questionnaire–egoistic bias correlations mostly reflect distortion of scores, and that the size of the relationship is stronger than previously thought. However, the size of this relationship does not appear to reach to the extent where it impacts notably on imagery questionnaire performance