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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...
Autores principales: | , |
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Formato: | Online Artículo Texto |
Lenguaje: | English |
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Frontiers Media S.A.
2020
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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. |
format | Online Article Text |
id | pubmed-7393925 |
institution | National Center for Biotechnology Information |
language | English |
publishDate | 2020 |
publisher | Frontiers Media S.A. |
record_format | MEDLINE/PubMed |
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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