Social desirability bias is the tendency of individuals to over-report behaviour viewed favourably by society, such as environmentally sustainable behaviour. The currently prevalent approach to managing social desirability bias in survey studies is to include a set of additional questions to determine a respondent's person-specific social desirability bias, which can also be used as a correction factor. Yet, the pooled correlation between person-specific social desirability and self-reported pro-environmental behaviour is weak. Our study challenges the currently dominant approach. We propose an alternative approach that uses a behaviour-specific indicator. The behaviour-specific indicator captures the social evaluation of the behaviour and perceived embarrassment when admitting to the behaviour. The analysis of the associations between person-specific and behaviour-specific social desirability bias indicators and 11 self-reported behaviours suggests that the behaviour-specific approach has a higher ability to alert researchers to the risk of socially desirable responding in self-report survey studies.

中文翻译：

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调查研究中社会期望偏差的风险是否应该在每种环保行为的层面上进行评估？

社会期望偏差是指个人过度报告社会认为有利的行为的倾向，例如环境可持续行为。目前在调查研究中管理社会期望偏差的流行方法是包括一组附加问题来确定受访者特定的社会期望偏差，这也可以用作校正因子。然而，个人特定的社会期望与自我报告的环保行为之间的总体相关性很弱。我们的研究挑战了目前占主导地位的方法。我们提出了一种使用特定行为指标的替代方法。特定行为指标反映了对行为的社会评价以及承认该行为时感受到的尴尬。对特定个人和特定行为的社会期望偏差指标与 11 种自我报告行为之间关联的分析表明，特定行为方法能够更好地提醒研究人员在自我报告调查研究中社会期望反应的风险。