Development of Scales to Assess Specific Deception Strategies on the Psychological Screening Inventory

Recent research suggests that the most successful procedures for assessing deception should be those that focus on the specific context of a particular deception attempt and on the particular deception strategy used by the respondent within that context. This article describes the development and validation of 4 scales to assess 2 different strategies for faking-bad (symptom overendorsement and erroneous psychiatric stereotype) and 2 different strategies for faking-good (endorsement of superior adjustment and endorsement of excessive virtue), on the basis of items of the Psychological Screening Inventory (PSI). Cross-validation data for the scales include respondents in real-life deception situations, simulation data, and patterns of correlations with the regular PSI scales.