ABSTRACT
Have you taken illicit drugs? Are you mentally tough? How often do you display aggressive acts toward your opponents in sport? Would you assist a stranger in need of help? These questions and many others like them are central to several academic disciplines within the social sciences. Asking people to respond truthfully to these questions, however, is a complex endeavor given the propensity for some people to excessively overestimate desirable attributes or actions and underestimate or deny undesirable qualities or behaviors on self-report scales (Paulhus 2002). Referred to as socially desirable responding (SDR), this response distortion has the potential to contaminate the accuracy of peoples’ self-reports and therefore the validity of empirical findings. In this chapter, we will provide an overview of the literature on SDR as it pertains to the social science of use of banned performance-enhancing substances or methods in sport, otherwise referred to as doping.
