Faking the results on a personality test might be more difficult now, thanks to a professor in the department of psychology and his research team.

Applying for a job generally consists of filling out an application, submitting a resume and taking a slew of “what-if,” “strongly agree or disagree” and “rate yourself from 1-to-5” tests.

And it is not commonly thought that employers will be fighting over potential employees who provide brutally honest self-assessments.

Dr. Jinyan Fan, an associate professor in the Department of Psychology, said that he knows this.

“I’m in the opinion that somebody (who) just faked on the personality test, does not mean that person is a liar,” Fan said. “It’s very (situational).”

Whether the test is being taken by someone for an internal promotion or who is seeking an entry-level position; personality tests are becoming more pervasive within the job market.

“Recent research has shown that personalities are quite predictive of job performance in the workplace,” Fan said. “And that’s why in the past decade personality tests have been increasingly used in selection contexts.”

The tests are easy to administer, cheap and quick to take.

And in general they make an assessment of universal personality traits known as the Big Five: neuroticism, extroversion, openness to experience, conscientiousness and agreeableness.

However, they can quickly become a waste of time and money if the applicant is dishonest.

“In personality tests there is no right or wrong answer, tems are very transparent,” Fan said. “Which makes it very easy, and the applicants see the need to ‘fake good’ and if you ‘fake good’ that destroys the purpose of the test. What I do in my research, I am trying to (understand) the faking behavior itself and more importantly I’m interested in can we manage that? From the organizations perspective, can we limit faking behavior, can we mitigate faking behavior?”

Through his research Fan has developed a method to dissuade dishonest self-representations during online testing.

An applicant will be allowed to complete nearly 25 percent of the test.

The results from the completed portion of the test will be assessed and if they are obviously too high, reflecting an overly positive self-representation, a warning message will appear.

From this point the applicant will be allowed to retake the test, with a potentially higher degree of honesty.

“The beauty of my procedure is it’s a one-time deal,” Fan said. “You don’t have to physically call people back. And you don’t have to have them retake the entire thing.”

Fan left a tenured position at Hofstra University in New York, and came to Auburn, where he also has been granted tenure, because of the higher degree of research opportunities the University offers.

“As a national university, a research school, you will receive the kind of research you need if you really wanted to advance your research agenda,” Fan said. “Here you have a lot monetary support, reduced teaching load and very competent graduate students. And because the school gives them financial support you may actually work with them.”

Dr.Dan J. Svyantek, Psychology Department chair and professor, said Fan has had a positive reception by both faculty and students.

A graduate teaching assistant and also one of Fan’s students, Ning Hou, said that Fan has a clear teaching method with his undergraduate students on complex issues such as statistics.

As a graduate student seeking her master’s in IO Psychology, Hou said that Fan’s graduate courses promote open discussion in the classroom that is grounded by Fan’s knowledge and experience of the field.

Svyantek and Fan both specialize in the area of industrial and organizational psychology, which loosely focuses on improving experiences for both employers and employees.

“He’s come up with a pretty new twist to the whole area, which is informing what we’re doing in the whole area of IO Psychology, trying to address on how bad faking is and how we can control it,” Svyantek said.

Fan received a 2013 Jeanneret Award for Excellence in the Study of Individual or Group Assessment because of his research.

The annual Jeanneret Award is given to an author of a work that is determined to have the greatest capacity for advancing understanding of group or individual assessments specifically relating to the diversifying work areas, according to the Society for Industrial and Organization Psychology, Inc.

The research team members were: Sarah Carroll, Professional Examination Service; T. Siva Tian, University of Houston; Dingguo Gao, Sun Yat-Sen University (China); Felix J. Lopez, Booz Allen Hamilton, Inc.; and Hui Meng, East China Normal University.

Along with the award, which was presented by the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology, the team’s work was published in the Journal of Applied Psychology.

Both studies were conducted at Sun Yat-Sen University at Guangzhou, in the Guangdong province of the People’s Republic of China.