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Social Desirability in Environmental Psychology Research: Three Meta-Analyses

That social desirability might be a confounder of people's survey responses regarding environmental actions has been discussed for a long time. To produce evidence for or against this assumption, we conducted meta-analyses of correlations between social desirability scales and self-reports of e...

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Autores principales: Vesely, Stepan, Klöckner, Christian A.
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Frontiers Media S.A. 2020
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7393925/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/32793022
http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2020.01395
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author Vesely, Stepan
Klöckner, Christian A.
author_facet Vesely, Stepan
Klöckner, Christian A.
author_sort Vesely, Stepan
collection PubMed
description That social desirability might be a confounder of people's survey responses regarding environmental actions has been discussed for a long time. To produce evidence for or against this assumption, we conducted meta-analyses of correlations between social desirability scales and self-reports of environmentally relevant behaviors, intentions, and (broadly defined) attitudes, based on data from 29 previously published papers. The pooled correlations with social desirability are generally small, ranging from 0.06 to 0.11 (0.08–0.13 when correcting for measurement error attenuation). However, our results do not lead to the conclusion that social desirability can be completely disregarded by environmental psychologists as a potential confounder. For example, we found evidence of substantial heterogeneity across studies, so the effect of social desirability may be more pronounced in specific cases. Continued attention to social desirability bias is needed to fully understand its possible subtle effects.
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spelling pubmed-73939252020-08-12 Social Desirability in Environmental Psychology Research: Three Meta-Analyses Vesely, Stepan Klöckner, Christian A. Front Psychol Psychology That social desirability might be a confounder of people's survey responses regarding environmental actions has been discussed for a long time. To produce evidence for or against this assumption, we conducted meta-analyses of correlations between social desirability scales and self-reports of environmentally relevant behaviors, intentions, and (broadly defined) attitudes, based on data from 29 previously published papers. The pooled correlations with social desirability are generally small, ranging from 0.06 to 0.11 (0.08–0.13 when correcting for measurement error attenuation). However, our results do not lead to the conclusion that social desirability can be completely disregarded by environmental psychologists as a potential confounder. For example, we found evidence of substantial heterogeneity across studies, so the effect of social desirability may be more pronounced in specific cases. Continued attention to social desirability bias is needed to fully understand its possible subtle effects. Frontiers Media S.A. 2020-07-24 /pmc/articles/PMC7393925/ /pubmed/32793022 http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2020.01395 Text en Copyright © 2020 Vesely and Klöckner. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
spellingShingle Psychology
Vesely, Stepan
Klöckner, Christian A.
Social Desirability in Environmental Psychology Research: Three Meta-Analyses
title Social Desirability in Environmental Psychology Research: Three Meta-Analyses
title_full Social Desirability in Environmental Psychology Research: Three Meta-Analyses
title_fullStr Social Desirability in Environmental Psychology Research: Three Meta-Analyses
title_full_unstemmed Social Desirability in Environmental Psychology Research: Three Meta-Analyses
title_short Social Desirability in Environmental Psychology Research: Three Meta-Analyses
title_sort social desirability in environmental psychology research: three meta-analyses
topic Psychology
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7393925/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/32793022
http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2020.01395
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