Paulhus Deception Scales (PDS)

Purpose: Identify individuals who distort their responses

Age: 16+ years

Time: 5–7 minutes

The Paulhus Deception Scales (PDS) is a 40-item self-report instrument that identifies individuals who, when responding to assessments and rating scales, distort their responses. Designed to be administered concurrently with other instruments, the PDS has been used to successfully identify individuals who might have distorted their responses when completing other clinical and/or personality diagnostic instruments.

Key Features

• Assesses socially desirable responding both as a response set and a response style
• Contains 40 items that use contemporary, gender-neutral language
• Backed by extensive empirical confirmation of reliability and validity, and is appropriate for both clinical and nonclinical samples
• May also be used in educational and human resource settings and can provide an index for comparing the power of different administration conditions to elicit desirable responding
• Useful in instrument development and evaluation
• Online scoring provides instantly generated reports with statistical, textual, and graphical interpretations of a respondent’s results

Scales

• Impression Management: The tendency to give inflated self-descriptions because of contextual factors
• Self-Deceptive Enhancement: The tendency to give honest but inflated self-descriptions

These two subscales allow the PDS to capture both principal forms of socially desirable responding. This approach accepts that respondents may display only one kind of desirable responding, or neither, or both.

Online Assessment and Reporting (MHS Assessment Center+; MAC+)

Online administration via MAC+ allows the assessor the flexibility to send a link to each respondent to complete the assessment at a location (e.g., child care center, school). Assessors using online scoring also have the option of printing E-Paper forms that can be scored online by entering the responses.

Sample Online PDS Report

MAC+ Quickstart Guide