Balanced Inventory of Desirable Responding (BIDR)

1. Abstract

The Balanced Inventory of Desirable Responding (BIDR), developed predominantly by Delroy L. Paulhus, is one of the most widely utilized psychometric instruments in personality psychology, organizational behavior, and clinical research for assessing socially desirable responding (SDR). Grounded in a dual-component model of response bias, the 40-item Version 6 instrument conceptualizes desirable responding as consisting of two functionally distinct, orthogonal dimensions: Self-Deceptive Enhancement (SDE) and Impression Management (IM). SDE captures an unconscious, honest propensity to perceive oneself in an overly positive light, reflecting psychological adjustment, self-esteem, ego-defense mechanisms, and positive cognitive illusions. In contrast, IM measures the conscious, deliberate dissimulation, faking, and strategic presentation of tailored social personas designed to elicit social approval or adhere to normative community expectations.

The instrument is administered using a 7-point Likert scale ranging from 1 (“NOT TRUE”) through 4 (“SOMEWHAT TRUE”) to 7 (“VERY TRUE”). Psychometrically, the BIDR exhibits established internal consistency, with Cronbach’s alpha coefficients typically ranging from .70 to .82 for the SDE subscale and from .80 to .86 for the IM subscale. Test-retest reliability across intervals of approximately five weeks demonstrates stable temporal consistency (.69 for SDE and .65 for IM). Factor-analytic investigations consistently corroborate the two-factor structural architecture across normal, workplace, and forensic populations. The BIDR demonstrates robust construct, convergent, and discriminant validity; SDE strongly relates to Extraversion, low Neuroticism, and mental health resilience, whereas IM aligns heavily with Agreeableness, Conscientiousness, and situational demand characteristics. The BIDR remains a benchmark control variable and theoretical measure in social and psychological measurement.

2. Keywords

Balanced Inventory of Desirable Responding, BIDR, socially desirable responding, self-deceptive enhancement, impression management, response bias, psychometrics, faking good, social desirability scale, self-presentation

3. Authors

The Balanced Inventory of Desirable Responding was conceptualized and refined by Delroy L. Paulhus, Ph.D., Emeritus Professor of Psychology at the University of British Columbia (UBC), Vancouver, Canada. Paulhus is recognized internationally for his seminal scholarship in personality assessment, dark personality traits (such as the Dark Triad), self-enhancement, and response biases.

Early psychometric contributions to the operationalization of self-deception and other-deception emerged from collaborations between Paulhus and Douglas B. Sackeim during the late 1970s and 1980s. Following iterations including Version 3 and Version 5, Paulhus formalized BIDR Version 6 at the Department of Psychology, University of British Columbia (2136 West Mall, Vancouver, BC, Canada V6T 1Z4). Academic correspondence historically routes through UBC’s Department of Psychology.

4. Purpose

In self-report behavioral research, psychometric assessment, and applied organizational screening, self-report methodology is vulnerable to systematic response distortion. When answering questions regarding socially sanctioned virtues, emotional stability, interpersonal ethics, and workplace compliance, respondents frequently deviate from objective truth. The foundational purpose of the BIDR is to dissect, quantify, and statistically control for this variance by separating automatic cognitive biases from purposeful self-presentation.

Historically, unidimensional measures of social desirability—such as the Marlowe-Crowne Social Desirability Scale (MCSDS) or the Edwards Social Desirability Scale—conflated distinct psychological dynamics into an undifferentiated single score. As a result, researchers could not determine whether an elevated score reflected pathological dissimulation, high moral conformity, authentic adjustment, or inflated self-regard. The BIDR addresses this ambiguity by delineating whether an individual’s inflated profile originates from genuine internal illusions of superiority (SDE) or an instrumental effort to deceive an external audience (IM).

In clinical contexts, the scale serves as an evaluative screen for personality disorders, defensiveness, and therapeutic readiness. For instance, excessively high SDE scores often accompany narcissistic configurations and defensive denial, whereas low SDE scores may reflect depressive realism or clinical distress. In forensic and custody evaluations, the IM scale identifies active malingering, feigned innocence, or tactical impression management. In organizational research and personnel selection, human resource professionals and industrial psychologists deploy the BIDR to identify applicants who distort their personal profiles on high-stakes employment batteries.

5. Psychological Construct

The construct of socially desirable responding within the BIDR framework is bifurcated into two primary psychological phenomena: Self-Deceptive Enhancement (SDE) and Impression Management (IM).

Self-Deceptive Enhancement (SDE)

Self-Deceptive Enhancement denotes an uncalculated, authentic tendency to view oneself in an excessively positive light. The individual genuinely subscribes to their own over-optimistic self-evaluations. This facet reflects deep-seated ego defense mechanisms, psychological resilience, and dispositional self-aggrandizement. Individuals exhibiting high SDE routinely dismiss personal fault, overlook cognitive fallibility, and maintain internal locus-of-control assumptions even under adverse conditions. Representative items include assertions such as believing that one’s initial impressions of others are invariably correct, that one never regrets personal decisions, and that one is entirely immune to intellectual bias or emotional interference. SDE correlates positively with optimism, subjective well-being, perceived self-efficacy, and narcissism, while displaying robust negative correlations with anxiety, depression, and neuroticism.

Impression Management (IM)

Impression Management represents the deliberate, conscious presentation of socially compliant, virtuous, and blameless conduct tailored to appease external evaluators or conform to cultural norms. Unlike SDE, IM is context-dependent and fluctuates markedly across situational demand conditions (e.g., anonymous surveys vs. public performance evaluations or competitive job interviews). Items operationalizing IM evaluate over-claims of behavioral perfection regarding routine micro-violations of social norms—such as disclaiming ever having gossiped, driven over the speed limit, sworn, or harbored vindictive thoughts. Elevated IM scores signify intentional self-censorship, moralistic posturing, or calculated faking.

6. Theoretical Framework

The theoretical framework of the BIDR is rooted in the psychodynamic and cognitive formulations developed by Sackeim and Gur (1978, 1979), alongside subsequent structural syntheses by Paulhus (1984, 1986, 1991). Sackeim and Gur established that self-deception entails holding two contradictory beliefs simultaneously, where one belief is motivated outside of primary conscious awareness. Paulhus translated this paradigm into psychometrics, recognizing that response bias scales historically collapsed two distinct behavioral functions: unconscious self-protection and conscious other-deception.

Paulhus integrated these observations into a dual-aspect taxonomy of self-enhancement. SDE is grounded in cognitive ego-defense theory and evolutionary perspectives on self-deception (e.g., Trivers, 2011). Under this view, self-deception evolved because individuals who genuinely believe in their superior competence, invulnerability, and virtue persuade others more effectively without displaying the autonomic cues of deliberate deceit. Hence, SDE functions as an intrapsychic buffer against existential terror, operationalizing what Taylor and Brown (1988) conceptualized as “positive illusions” essential for mental health.

Conversely, IM is anchored in Erving Goffman’s dramaturgical sociological theory of self-presentation and Schlenker’s (1980) impression management paradigm. According to this framework, human actors modulate behavioral disclosures to govern interpersonal impressions, safeguard social capital, avoid formal sanctions, and secure rewards. Consequently, the BIDR unites cognitive-personality theory (SDE) with social-interactionist communication theory (IM).

7. Validity

The psychometric validity of the BIDR has been corroborated across numerous empirical investigations:

• Convergent Validity: The BIDR composite exhibits strong convergence with established social desirability inventories. The total BIDR score correlates substantially with the Marlowe-Crowne Social Desirability Scale (r = .71). When evaluated at the subscale level, the IM subscale correlates strongly with other-deception inventories, the Lie (L) scales of the MMPI and Eysenck Personality Questionnaire (EPQ), and traditional moralistic scales (r ranging from .60 to .75). The SDE subscale demonstrates convergent validity with scales measuring generalized self-efficacy, internal locus of control, Rosenberg’s Self-Esteem Scale (r = .50 to .60), and the Narcissistic Personality Inventory (NPI; r = .40 to .55).
• Discriminant Validity: SDE and IM demonstrate clear empirical divergence. Intercorrelations between SDE and IM in community and collegiate samples are small to moderate (typically r = .15 to .30), confirming they measure distinct psychological phenomena. In structural equation modeling, constraining the correlation between SDE and IM to unity produces substantial decrements in model fit. Furthermore, SDE selectively correlates with Five-Factor Model dimensions: positive associations with Extraversion (r = .30 to .40) and inverse associations with Neuroticism (r = -.40 to -.60). In contrast, IM correlates selectively with Agreeableness (r = .35 to .45) and Conscientiousness (r = .30 to .40), while remaining unrelated to Neuroticism.
• Predictive and Experimental Validity: Experimental manipulations manipulating demand characteristics (e.g., anonymous responding vs. public accountability or competitive applicant instructions) selectively induce elevations in IM scores (often yielding increases greater than one standard deviation) while leaving SDE scores relatively stable. This demonstrates that IM captures deliberate behavioral adjustments to external incentives, whereas SDE functions as a stable cognitive personality trait.

8. Reliability

The reliability of the BIDR Version 6 has been substantiated across diverse demographic cohorts, languages, and testing contexts:

• Internal Consistency: Classical test theory evaluations consistently yield acceptable to good internal reliability metrics. For the Self-Deceptive Enhancement (SDE) subscale (20 items), Cronbach’s alpha typically ranges from .70 to .82 across collegiate, general adult, and clinical populations. For the Impression Management (IM) subscale (20 items), Cronbach’s alpha typically ranges from .80 to .86. When scored using continuous Likert summation, alpha coefficients occasionally increase slightly (e.g., .83 for SDE, .88 for IM) compared to dichotomous scoring schemes.
• Test-Retest Reliability: Temporal stability evaluations confirm that the BIDR captures durable individual differences over time. Over a five-week retest interval under standard baseline conditions, Paulhus reported test-retest correlation coefficients of r = .69 for SDE and r = .65 for IM. Over shorter intervals (two to three weeks), coefficients frequently exceed .75 for both dimensions.

9. Factor Analysis

The factorial structure of the BIDR has been extensively scrutinized using both exploratory factor analysis (EFA) and confirmatory factor analysis (CFA):

Exploratory Factor Analysis

Early principal axis factoring and principal component analyses (using both varimax and oblimin rotations) performed on the 40 items consistently extracted two primary eigenvalues accounting for substantial systemic variance. Items 1 through 20 loaded cleanly onto the first prominent factor (Self-Deceptive Enhancement), characterized by loadings generally between .35 and .65, with negligible cross-loadings onto the second dimension. Items 21 through 40 loaded onto the second factor (Impression Management), with salient factor loadings ranging from .40 to .70.

Confirmatory Factor Analysis

Confirmatory factor analyses testing competing structural specifications routinely demonstrate the superiority of the correlated two-factor model over a unidimensional SDR model. A single-factor solution yields poor model fit (CFI < .80, RMSEA > .08). In contrast, the two-factor specification provides improved fit across non-clinical, organizational, and international cross-cultural samples (CFI > .90, TLI > .89, RMSEA ≈ .045 to .055, SRMR < .06).

Subsequent psychometric investigations have sometimes isolated sub-facets within SDE (e.g., self-deceptive denial vs. self-deceptive enhancement, or agentic vs. moralistic biases as conceptualized in Paulhus’s later two-tier models). Nevertheless, the classic 40-item two-factor configuration remains the standard structural representation of the instrument.

10. Instrument / Measurement Tool

• Standard Designation: Balanced Inventory of Desirable Responding, Version 6 (BIDR-6).
• Total Item Count: 40 declarative statements.
• Subscales:
  • Self-Deceptive Enhancement (SDE): 20 items (Items 1 to 20).
  • Impression Management (IM): 20 items (Items 21 to 40).
• Response Scale: 7-point Likert scale (1 = NOT TRUE, 4 = SOMEWHAT TRUE, 7 = VERY TRUE).
• Balanced Design: To control for acquiescence response bias, each 20-item subscale features an exact 50/50 split between positively keyed items and reverse-keyed items.
• Reverse-Scored Items:
  • SDE Subscale: Items 1, 3, 5, 7, 9, 11, 13, 15, 17, and 19.
  • IM Subscale: Items 22, 24, 26, 28, 30, 32, 34, 36, 38, and 40.
• Scoring Protocols:
  • Dichotomous (Paulhus Classic): After inverting the keyed items, only extreme socially desirable responses receive points. Specifically, 1 point is assigned for every item rated either 6 or 7. Responses rated from 1 to 5 receive 0 points. Subscale totals range from 0 to 20. This protocol minimizes variance driven by moderate response styles and isolates pronounced self-enhancement or overt faking.
  • Continuous Scoring: After reversing the keyed items (1=7, 2=6, 3=5, 4=4, 5=3, 6=2, 7=1), item values (1 through 7) are summed or averaged across each subscale. Scores on each subscale range from 20 to 140 (or 1.0 to 7.0 as an average). Continuous scoring preserves full distributional variance and is often preferred for correlational and structural equation modeling applications.
• Administration Time: Approximately 8 to 12 minutes.

11. Permissions & Fee and Test Year

The academic development of the BIDR spans several decades, with Version 6 solidified and documented in its widely cited reference manual in 1991 (with subsequent reference manuals and updates published in 1993 and 1998). BIDR Version 6 was placed in the academic public domain by Delroy L. Paulhus for non-commercial, scholarly, educational, and research uses, permitting independent researchers to administer, score, and analyze the instrument without royalty fees.

For commercial, proprietary organizational hiring, or professional clinical diagnostic deployments requiring formal standardized norm tables, a commercial version was licensed through Multi-Health Systems (MHS). Researchers utilizing the BIDR-6 in academic investigations should cite the primary literature and manual (Paulhus, 1991, 1993) and review the author’s academic institutional guidelines regarding non-profit research use.

12. 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

Goffman, E. (1959). The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Anchor Books.

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. (1986). Self-deception and impression management in test responses. In A. Angleitner & J. S. Wiggins (Eds.), Personality Assessment via Questionnaires (pp. 143–165). Springer-Verlag. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-70751-3_8

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. (1993). The Balanced Inventory of Desirable Responding: Reference manual for BIDR Version 6. University of British Columbia.

Paulhus, D. L. (1998). Paulhus Deception Scales (PDS): Manual for the Balanced Inventory of Desirable Responding (BIDR-7). Multi-Health Systems.

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, other-deception, and self-reported psychopathology. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 46(4), 646–653. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-006X.46.4.646

Sackeim, H. A., & Gur, R. C. (1979). Self-deception, other-deception, and self-reported psychopathology: An experimental integration. Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 88(5), 478–489. https://doi.org/10.1037/0021-843X.88.5.478

Schlenker, B. R. (1980). Impression Management: The Self-Concept, Social Identity, and Interpersonal Relations. Brooks/Cole.

Taylor, S. E., & Brown, J. D. (1988). Illusion and well-being: A social psychological perspective on mental health. Psychological Bulletin, 103(2), 193–210. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.103.2.193

13. Items of the Scale