Balanced Inventory of Desirable Responding Version 6

Abstract

The Balanced Inventory of Desirable Responding Version 6 (BIDR-6) is a seminal, 40-item psychometric instrument designed by Delroy L. Paulhus to assess two distinct dimensions of socially desirable responding (SDR): Self-Deceptive Enhancement (SDE) and Impression Management (IM). Rooted in psychodynamic, social-cognitive, and evolutionary paradigms, the BIDR-6 differentiates between an individual’s unprompted, honest-but-overconfident belief in their own positive qualities (an intrapsychic defense or ego enhancement) and deliberate, conscious self-presentation tailored toward gaining social approval and conforming to normative standards (an interpersonal distortion). The instrument features 40 propositions evaluated on a 7-point Likert scale ranging from 1 (NOT TRUE) to 7 (VERY TRUE), split evenly into two 20-item subscales. Psychometric evaluation across diverse international populations confirms robust internal consistency (Cronbach’s alpha typically ranging from .68 to .80 for SDE, and .75 to .86 for IM) and acceptable test-retest reliability. Factor analytic studies consistently validate its two-component orthogonal or weakly correlated structure. The BIDR-6 can be scored continuously to preserve statistical power or dichotomously to isolate extreme moralistic and egoistic response distortion. This instrument remains one of the gold standards in personality assessment, organizational selection, clinical evaluation, and survey methodology for detecting, controlling, and theoretically interpreting response bias.

Keywords

Balanced Inventory of Desirable Responding, BIDR-6, Socially Desirable Responding, Self-Deceptive Enhancement, Impression Management, Response Bias, Delroy L. Paulhus, Psychometrics, Faking Good, Lie Scales

Authors

The Balanced Inventory of Desirable Responding was conceived, developed, and systematically refined by Delroy L. Paulhus, Ph.D., Professor Emeritus of Psychology at the University of British Columbia (Vancouver, Canada). Paulhus is an internationally acclaimed authority on personality assessment, the structure of self-presentation, and subclinical personality deviations (most notably co-conceptualizing the Dark Triad alongside Kevin M. Williams). His early psychometric investigations into response distortion began in the late 1970s and culminated throughout the 1980s and 1990s in iterative releases of the BIDR, with Version 6 representing the mature, internationally standardized 40-item model published in 1991 and detailed in the 1994 UBC technical reference manual.

Purpose

The primary purpose of the BIDR-6 is to measure individual differences in socially desirable responding with explicit differentiation between involuntary self-favoring cognitive styles and conscious manipulation of public image. Self-report measures in personality, clinical, forensic, and organizational contexts are fundamentally vulnerable to systematically distorted responses. Historically, scales measuring social desirability—such as the Marlowe-Crowne Social Desirability Scale (MCSDS) or the MMPI Lie (L) and Correction (K) scales—treated response bias as a single global construct, blending conscious dishonesty with earnest self-aggrandizement.

Paulhus introduced the BIDR-6 to solve this confounding issue by isolating two structurally, functionally, and motivationally distinct components:

• Self-Deceptive Enhancement (SDE): Measures an individual’s unconscious tendency to hold overly positive perceptions of their personal capabilities, intellectual competence, and emotional stability. Because respondents genuinely believe their inflated self-descriptions, high scores reflect dispositional narcissism, generalized self-efficacy, and rigid psychological defense mechanisms rather than intentional prevarication.
• Impression Management (IM): Assesses purposeful dissimulation, overt faking, and deliberate falsification of overt behavior to cultivate an agreeable, rule-abiding, and morally blameless persona in the eyes of an audience.

The clinical and applied utility of the BIDR-6 spans several major psychological domains:

• Industrial/Organizational Psychology: In high-stakes pre-employment screening and promotional selection, applicant dissimulation distorts the construct validity of standard five-factor model (FFM) personality inventories. The BIDR-6 allows human resource professionals and organizational psychologists to identify overt faking (IM elevation) versus resilient self-confidence (SDE elevation).
• Forensic and Custody Evaluations: Assessors employ the BIDR-6 to identify individuals intentionally feigning psychological virtues, moral purity, or domestic stability under evaluative conditions where appearing socially deviant entails legal consequences.
• Basic Research & Survey Methodology: When investigating sensitive topics (e.g., substance misuse, unethical behavior, prejudice, sexual conduct), researchers utilize the BIDR-6 either as a covariate to control statistically for variance attributable to response bias or as a substantive indicator of psychological adaptation and interpersonal style.

Psychological Construct

Socially desirable responding (SDR) refers to the pervasive tendency of individuals to present an overly favorable picture of themselves on self-report questionnaires. Under the Paulhus taxonomic framework, SDR is not a monolithic artifact, but a multi-tiered behavioral disposition divided along two major functional axes: Egoistic vs. Moralistic orientations, operationalized respectively as Self-Deceptive Enhancement and Impression Management.

1. Self-Deceptive Enhancement (SDE)

Self-Deceptive Enhancement captures an egoistic bias—a cognitive orientation characterized by exaggerated claims of intellectual capacity, agentic power, emotional invulnerability, and perceived control over life events. Individuals scoring high on SDE are not willfully lying; rather, their subjective cognitive architecture operates via automatic defenses that filter out self-threatening feedback, psychological insecurities, and internal contradictions. This process preserves high self-esteem and maintains perceived omnipotence.

Illustrative items capturing SDE include:

• “My first impressions of people usually turn out to be right” (Item 1) and “I am very confident of my judgments” (Item 17): Indexing cognitive dogmatism, intellectual overconfidence, and an illusion of epistemic infallibility.
• “I am fully in control of my own fate” (Item 9): Capturing an extreme, unrealistic internal locus of control and perceived omnipotence.
• “I never regret my decisions” (Item 11) and “When my emotions are aroused, it biases my thinking” (Item 6, reverse scored): Measuring an absolute denial of emotional fragility, regret, or cognitive vulnerability.

Because SDE functions intrapsychically, it correlates strongly with subjective well-being, hardiness, dispositional optimism, positive affectivity, and subclinical narcissism, while displaying negative relationships with depression, neuroticism, and self-doubt.

2. Impression Management (IM)

Impression Management reflects a moralistic bias—a deliberate, communicative, and situational self-presentation strategy directed at an external audience. High-IM respondents consciously conform to social sanctions, actively concealing interpersonal transgressions, taboo impulses, and petty ethical failures in order to maintain a spotless social reputation.

Representative items indexing IM include:

• “I never cover up my mistakes” (Item 22) and “I never swear” (Item 24): Asserting improbable perfection regarding minor everyday norm violations.
• “I always obey laws, even if I’m unlikely to get caught” (Item 26) and “I have never dropped litter on the street” (Item 32): Denying common infractions that virtually all individuals in typical human societies occasionally commit.
• “I have taken sick-leave from work or school even though I wasn’t really sick” (Item 37, reverse scored) and “I have received too much change from a salesperson without telling him or her” (Item 29, reverse scored): Assessing willingness to admit universal, petty dishonesties.

Unlike SDE, IM scores are highly malleable across social contexts. When evaluations are administered anonymously or in low-stakes environments, IM scores drop substantially. In contrast, under high-stakes conditions (e.g., job interviews, court hearings), IM scores elevate markedly, demonstrating its role as a conscious response style.

Theoretical Framework

The theoretical underpinning of the BIDR-6 builds upon four decades of psychometric inquiry into human dissimulation. The conceptual lineage of response biases began with Allen L. Edwards (1957), who demonstrated that the probability of endorsing an item was a direct linear function of its social desirability rating. Edwards viewed desirability primarily as an annoying source of method variance that confounded content variance.

In 1960, Douglas P. Crowne and David Marlowe shifted the focus toward individual differences with the Marlowe-Crowne Social Desirability Scale (MCSDS). Crowne and Marlowe conceptualized SDR as an enduring personality trait reflecting an underlying need for social approval and a vulnerability to defensive conformity. However, factor analyses of the MCSDS continuously revealed two ambiguous, unstable factors that theoretical models could not cleanly delineate.

A major breakthrough occurred when Harold A. Sackeim and Ruben C. Gur (1978) formulated an information-processing model of self-deception, establishing the Self-Deception Questionnaire (SDQ) and the Other-Deception Questionnaire (ODQ). They operationalized self-deception as holding two contradictory beliefs simultaneously, where the negative belief is held unconsciously while the positive belief is consciously acknowledged.

Delroy L. Paulhus synthesized, critiqued, and restructured the Sackeim-Gur framework. Paulhus (1984, 1991) proved that the SDQ and ODQ suffered from significant psychometric artifacts—specifically, confounding content valence with response bias, and possessing high item redundancy. By removing overtly psychopathological content and balancing the direction of item wording to counter acquiescence bias, Paulhus developed the BIDR. Version 6 unified response bias under the dual-component model:

1. Agency / Egoistic Axis (SDE): Grounded in evolutionary and ego-defensive models of mental health. According to modern evolutionary psychology, holding slightly elevated, overconfident evaluations of one’s own abilities provides adaptive advantages in intra-group competition, risk-taking, and status-seeking.
2. Communion / Moralistic Axis (IM): Grounded in sociometric and impression-management models of social coordination (such as Erving Goffman’s theatrical self-presentation theories). Preserving social bonds requires demonstrating adherence to communal standards, ethical dependability, and self-restraint.

Validity

The construct, convergent, discriminant, and criterion-related validity of the BIDR-6 have been corroborated across hundreds of empirical investigations in academic, organizational, and forensic settings.

1. Convergent Validity

Empirical studies demonstrate that the IM subscale correlates strongly with traditional social desirability measures that index public conformity and need for approval:

• Correlation with Marlowe-Crowne (MCSDS): r = .55 to .75.
• Correlation with the Eysenck Personality Questionnaire Lie (L) Scale: r = .60 to .70.
• Correlation with the MMPI Lie (L) Scale: r = .50 to .65.

In contrast, the SDE subscale demonstrates convergent validity with measures of perceived personal competence and emotional adjustment:

• Correlation with Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale: r = .50 to .60.
• Correlation with Generalized Self-Efficacy: r = .45 to .55.
• Correlation with subclinical narcissism (NPI): r = .40 to .52.

2. Discriminant Validity

The discriminant validity between SDE and IM is demonstrated by their differential relationships with the Five-Factor Model of Personality:

• SDE: Correlates strongly and negatively with Neuroticism (r = -.45 to -.60), and positively with Extraversion (r = .30 to .40) and Conscientiousness (r = .25 to .35). Its association with Agreeableness is typically negligible or weakly positive.
• IM: Correlates strongly and positively with Agreeableness (r = .35 to .50) and Conscientiousness (r = .30 to .45), while showing minimal or zero correlation with Extraversion and only moderate negative correlation with Neuroticism.
• Inter-factor Correlation: In standard testing conditions, the correlation between SDE and IM is small to moderate (ranging from r = .05 to .30), confirming that they tap distinct psychological dimensions.

3. Criterion and Predictive Validity

Experimental studies using instructional manipulation paradigms (“fake-good” vs. “respond honestly”) provide robust evidence for the criterion validity of the BIDR-6:

• Under explicit instructions to simulate the ideal job candidate, IM scores jump by 1.0 to 1.5 standard deviations, whereas SDE scores shift only marginally (0.2 to 0.4 standard deviations).
• Paulhus and Reid (1991) proved that under cognitive load or polygraph “bogus pipeline” verification, IM scores decline significantly toward objective reality, whereas SDE scores remain virtually unchanged, proving that SDE reflects a genuine private conviction rather than an overt communication strategy.

Reliability

Extensive psychometric investigations have established that both subscales of the BIDR-6 display acceptable to high internal consistency and longitudinal stability across normal, student, clinical, and applicant samples.

Internal Consistency

When evaluated using continuous scoring (summing or averaging all 7 response points), internal consistency estimates (Cronbach’s alpha) are consistently robust:

• Self-Deceptive Enhancement (SDE): Alpha coefficients typically range between .68 and .80 across standard university and adult community samples (Paulhus, 1991; Stöber et al., 2002). Lower alphas are occasionally found in culturally diverse groups, which led to subsequent refinements in Paulhus’s later Paulhus Deception Scales (PDS / BIDR-7).
• Impression Management (IM): Alpha coefficients reliably range from .75 to .86, reflecting exceptionally homogeneous item content regarding moralistic compliance and rule obedience.

When scored using the conservative dichotomous scoring method (awarding one point only for extreme ratings of 6 or 7 after reverse-keying), Cronbach’s alpha drops slightly (ranging from .65 to .75 for SDE, and .70 to .82 for IM) due to the truncation of variance, but the scale gains specificity in isolating extreme dissimulators.

Test-Retest Stability

Temporal stability assessments reveal high reliability across multi-week intervals:

• Paulhus (1991) reported a 5-week test-retest correlation of r = .69 for SDE and r = .65 for IM in an unselected undergraduate sample.
• In subsequent longitudinal studies over 6- to 8-week intervals, test-retest coefficients remained steady between r = .64 and .78 for both subscales, demonstrating that these constructs capture durable stylistic traits rather than fleeting mood states.

Factor Analysis

The structural dimensionality of the BIDR-6 has been examined extensively using both Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) and Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA).

Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA)

Early principal component and principal axis factor analyses conducted by Paulhus (1984, 1991) with varimax and oblimin rotations revealed a distinct two-factor solution that accounted for the majority of the common variance:

• Factor 1 (Impression Management): Items 21 through 40 load systematically on this factor, with primary loadings ranging from .35 to .65. Cross-loadings on the second factor are consistently below .20.
• Factor 2 (Self-Deceptive Enhancement): Items 1 through 20 load cleanly on this factor, with standardized pattern loadings ranging between .30 and .60.

Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA)

Subsequent structural evaluations (e.g., Stöber, Dette, & Musch, 2002; Paulhus, Bruce, & Trapnell, 1995) comparing one-factor, two-factor orthogonal, and two-factor oblique models confirmed the superiority of the two-factor specification:

• The unidimensional model (collapsing all 40 items into a single global SDR factor) demonstrates poor fit indices (e.g., CFI < .75, RMSEA > .08).
• The two-factor oblique model provides an acceptable fit to empirical data (CFI > .90, TLI > .88, RMSEA ≈ .045 to .055), establishing that SDE and IM represent two distinct latent dimensions.
• In some subsequent structural investigations, SDE has been broken down into two micro-components: Self-Deceptive Enhancement (agentic overconfidence) and Self-Deceptive Denial (avoidance of negative thoughts and impulses); however, the consolidated 20-item SDE factor remains the standard operationalization in Version 6.

Instrument / Measurement Tool

• Test Type: Standardized psychological self-report inventory / response bias measure.
• Target Population: Adolescents and adults (ages 16 and above) with a minimum 6th-grade reading comprehension level.
• Administration Format: Paper-and-pencil questionnaire or computer-administered digital assessment. Can be administered individually or in large group settings.
• Completion Time: Approximately 5 to 10 minutes.
• Total Item Count: 40 declarative statements.
• Subscales:
  • Self-Deceptive Enhancement (SDE): Items 1 through 20 (20 items).
  • Impression Management (IM): Items 21 through 40 (20 items).
• Response Format: 7-point Likert scale (1 = NOT TRUE, 4 = SOMEWHAT TRUE, 7 = VERY TRUE).
• Scoring Protocols:
  • Step 1 (Reverse Coding): Reverse-score the negatively keyed items so that high values always indicate greater desirable responding. The reverse-coded items are:
    • SDE Subscale: Items 2, 4, 6, 8, 10, 12, 14, 16, 18, and 20.
    • IM Subscale: Items 21, 23, 25, 27, 29, 31, 33, 35, 37, and 39.

    (Recoding formula on a 1–7 scale: Recoded Score = 8 - Original Score).

  • Protocol A — Continuous Scoring: Sum or average the ratings across the 20 items in each subscale (range: 20 to 140 per subscale, or 1.0 to 7.0 as a scale mean). Continuous scoring is recommended for academic research as it preserves full variance and maximizes statistical power in correlational and regression models.
  • Protocol B — Dichotomous (Paulhus) Scoring: Award 1 point exclusively for extreme socially desirable answers (a score of 6 or 7 on the 7-point scale after reverse-keying), and 0 points for ratings 1 through 5. Scale scores range from 0 to 20 for each subscale. This method isolates respondents who show pronounced, non-normative bias and is widely used in organizational pre-employment screening and forensic testing.

Permissions & Fee and Test Year

The Balanced Inventory of Desirable Responding Version 6 was officially standardized in 1991 and published as an operational research manual in 1994 by Delroy L. Paulhus through the University of British Columbia (Vancouver, BC, Canada). The BIDR-6 items are broadly available in the academic literature for non-commercial research, university teaching, and non-profit educational purposes without license fees, provided proper scholarly citation is given.

Subsequent commercial adaptations, including the computerized and standardized Paulhus Deception Scales (PDS) (also known as BIDR Version 7), were copyrighted and distributed by Multi-Health Systems (MHS). Researchers intending to utilize the proprietary PDS norms or administered software in commercial, high-stakes pre-employment, or legal settings must obtain a commercial license from the publisher. For standard scholarly and thesis research, BIDR-6 remains an open-access psychometric instrument.

References

• Crowne, D. P., & Marlowe, D. (1960). A new scale of social desirability independent of psychopathology. Journal of Consulting Psychology, 24(4), 349–354. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0047358
• Edwards, A. L. (1957). The social desirability variable in personality assessment and research. Dryden Press.
• Paulhus, D. L. (1984). Two-component models of socially desirable responding. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 46(3), 598–609. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.46.3.598
• Paulhus, D. L. (1991). Measurement and control of response bias. In J. P. Robinson, P. R. Shaver, & L. S. Wrightsman (Eds.), Measures of personality and social psychological attitudes (pp. 17–59). Academic Press. https://doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-12-590241-0.50006-X
• Paulhus, D. L. (1994). Balanced Inventory of Desirable Responding: Reference manual for BIDR Version 6. University of British Columbia.
• Paulhus, D. L., Bruce, M. N., & Trapnell, P. D. (1995). Effects of self-presentation strategies on personality profiles and their structure. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 21(2), 100–108. https://doi.org/10.1177/0146167295212001
• Paulhus, D. L., & Reid, D. B. (1991). Enhancement and denial in socially desirable responding. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 60(2), 307–317. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.60.2.307
• Sackeim, H. A., & Gur, R. C. (1978). Self-deception, self-confrontation, and consciousness. In G. E. Schwartz & D. Shapiro (Eds.), Consciousness and self-regulation (Vol. 2, pp. 139–197). Plenum Press. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4684-2571-0_4
• Stöber, J., Dette, D. E., & Musch, J. (2002). Comparing continuous and dichotomous scoring of the Balanced Inventory of Desirable Responding. Journal of Personality Assessment, 78(2), 370–389. https://doi.org/10.1207/S15327752JPA7802_10

13. Items of the Scale (Questionnaire)