Gender and race differences on incentivized personality measures

Introduction Employment screening based on personalities gives applicants incentives to misrepresent themselves. Studies of group differences on personality measures primarily examine differences on measures taken without incentives for misrepresentation. Incentives may matter for group differences for at least two reasons. First, groups with different unincentivized means have different scope to distort their responses—differences in “opportunity-to-fake.” Second, groups may differ in their notions of what constitutes a desirable personality. Methods We use a within-subject laboratory experiment to examine group differences on Big Five measures. Subjects first responded without incentives. A week later, subjects viewed a job ad and were informed that bonuses would be paid to subjects best fitting the hiring criteria. The treatments varied the information in the ad about desired personality traits. Results Controlling for opportunity-to-fake, we find evidence of racial but not gender differences in faking. Incentives attenuate gender differences on unincentivized personality measures but lead to racial differences where no differences exist on unincentivized measures. In every instance where a gap emerged on an incentivized measure where none existed on the unincentivized measure, the minority group would be disadvantaged were hiring based on the measure. We assess whether protected groups would be adversely impacted from selection on incentivized measures using the realized group differences in the experiment and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission's “four-fifth's” rule. We find no evidence that women would be adversely affected by selection on incentivized personality measures, but racial minorities would be adversely impacted in the majority of trait-treatment comparisons. Discussion Given the prevalence of personality testing in employment screening, more research is needed on how the incentives for response distortion present in hiring influence racial differences on personality measures and whether any such differences influence hiring outcomes.