Social Desirability Bias: How to Reduce Social Desirability Bias

Social desirability bias is a type of response bias in which survey participants opt to provide socially desirable responses rather than truthful ones. In other words, they’re more likely to say they possess widely admired personality traits and hue closely to social norms than to admit they occasionally act in a less desirable way.

Survey questions about sexual behavior, drug use, and engagement in taboo activities are especially prone to instances of this bias in data collection, leading to measurement errors and an inaccurate analysis down the line.

When people respond to survey questions dishonestly, it makes it impossible to use reliable metrics in an equally reliable way—when you get bad information, you come to bad conclusions.

Overreporting socially acceptable behavior and underreporting socially unacceptable behavior leads to inaccurate data in the social sciences as a whole. As a result, it’s difficult for social psychology professionals to assess the true prevalence of certain behavior traits or personality attributes in the wider population.

Social desirability bias crops up for understandable reasons. Here are just three of the most prominent:

1. 1. Personal shame: Many people feel the urge to engage in impression management when it comes to their outward-facing persona. This leads them to maximize their positive measures of personality to achieve a sense of enhancement, as opposed to making themselves look bad by being honest about their less appreciable attributes. Sometimes a person knowingly engages in social desirability bias; however, on other occasions, it’s symptomatic of a broader form of self-deception. If you are in a position in which you have to ask for others’ personal information, remember to respect their mental health, well-being, and personal dignity.
2. 2. Privacy concerns: Mitigating the social desirability effect relies in part on overcoming people’s legitimate anxieties about the way certain institutions collect data. For example, someone might feel obligated to lie about habits like smoking or drinking alcohol if they’re wary about the survey provider somehow selling the information to their insurance or health care provider. Survey providers can expect cagier self-report measures from their participants if they refuse to provide them with anonymity and confidentiality.
3. 3. Social stigma: When people opt for desirable responding, it occurs largely due to the recognition of social norms and stigmas. The measures of social desirability response bias correlate strongly with the individual differences between a person’s assessment of themselves and what they perceive as acceptable to society as a whole. If they feel out of step with the wider world, they’re more likely to want to fit in than to admit to behaviors many people consider abhorrent or out of the ordinary.

With some finesse and empathy, you can do plenty to overcome people’s psychological need to hide their true selves. Consider these tips as you build your own methodology to curtail social desirability bias and encourage others to answer honestly and accurately:

• Ask questions in a roundabout way. Consider an indirect questioning approach if you think it might put your participants more at ease. For example, you could ask how often the person’s friends or social subgroup engages in a taboo behavior rather than if the person does so themselves.
• Allow anonymity. People will feel more likely to answer questions of a sensitive nature if you grant them anonymity. Try to make the survey as faceless as possible, giving the person permission to answer freely and openly without the idea of another human quietly judging them for their responses. If you opt for a face-to-face interview instead of an online survey, for instance, you run the risk of forcing the participant into a regression toward social desirability bias.
• Frame questions appropriately. Remember people will sometimes struggle with divulging personal information regardless of how privately they can do so. For instance, a blunt short-form questionnaire will probably feel inappropriate for gaining information about a person’s worst habits. Try to ask polling questions that dance around touchy subjects rather than phrasing them in a particularly invasive way.
• Guarantee total confidentiality. Confidentiality can serve as one of the most useful incentives to overcome prevalent social psychological attitudes and answer honestly. Alongside ensuring anonymity, assure each participant you’ll never release anything the respondent answers to a third party in any form. When someone feels certain personal information will remain private, they’re more likely to answer sensitive questions openly.

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