Faking During Employment Interviews: An Experiment Investigating the Effect of Descriptive and Injunctive Norm Alignment

Sammanfattning: Previous research has shown that it is common for job candidates to use faking tactics in the context of employment interviews, but situational antecedents of applicant faking has been understudied. Using an experimental design, we aimed to investigate if descriptive and injunctive norms interact to influence the intention to engage in mild types of faking during job interviews.The data were collected through an online survey, where participants (N = 447) were asked to rate their intentions to fake in a hypothetical scenario after being exposed to one out of four norm conditions or being assigned to a no norm control condition. The results did not support the hypotheses, as the respondents presented with both descriptive and injunctive honesty norms did not express significantly lower faking intentions than the respondents that were exposed to two unaligned norms or those in the control group. Moreover, no difference was observed between the participants that were presented with both descriptive and injunctive faking norms and the respondents in the norm condition in which a descriptive faking norm and an injunctive honesty norm were signaled. The participants presented with two faking norms also did not differ significantly from the control group. Thus, the findings do not support the idea that the exposure to two aligned norms influences people’s faking intentions, at least in this specific context. However, more research is needed on this topic before any general conclusions can be drawn.