The Good, the Bad, and the Clever: Faking Ability as a Socio-Emotional Ability?

Socio-emotional abilities have been proposed as an extension to models of intelligence, but earlier measurement approaches have either not fulfilled criteria of ability measurement or have covered only predominantly receptive abilities. We argue that faking ability—the ability to adjust responses on questionnaires to present oneself in a desired manner—is a socio-emotional ability that can broaden our understanding of these abilities and intelligence in general. To test this theory, we developed new instruments to measure the ability to fake bad (malingering) and administered them jointly with established tests of faking good ability in a general sample of n = 134. Participants also completed multiple tests of emotion perception along with tests of emotion expression posing, pain expression regulation, and working memory capacity. We found that individual differences in faking ability tests are best explained by a general factor that had a large correlation with receptive socio-emotional abilities and had a zero to medium-sized correlation with different productive socio-emotional abilities. All correlations were still small after controlling these effects for shared variance with general mental ability as indicated by tests of working memory capacity. We conclude that faking ability is indeed correlated meaningfully with other socio-emotional abilities and discuss the implications for intelligence research and applied ability assessment.