Religiosity and social desirability: impression management and self-deceptive positivity

The first aim of the present study was to replicate previous research, which has investigated the association between scores on the Francis Scale of Attitudes towards Christianity (FSAC) (Francis & Stubbs, 1987) and scores on Eysenckʹs Personality Questionnaire (EPQ-R Short Scale) (Eysenck & Eysenck, 1991). Further evidence is presented that higher religiosity is associated with lower scores on the psychoticism scale. The main aim of the present study, however, was to investigate the association between social desirability and religiosity. Although no association was found between religiosity and Lie scale scores in the present study, there is debate over what the Lie scale is actually measuring and so we also included, among other measures, the Balanced Inventory of Desirable Responding (BIDR: Paulhus, 1988), which consists of two subscales, self deceptive positivity and impression management. It was found that although religiosity was not associated with self-deception it was associated with impression management.