Social desirability may cause spurious relations in self-rating measures. The present study sought to disentangle socially desirable responding and content in the relation between measures of personality traits and well-being. Social desirability was operationalized as the evaluative factor (the tendency to react to evaluative content in questionnaire items). We collected self- and peer-ratings of personality and self-ratings of well-being from 219 participants. The evaluative factor in personality self-ratings significantly predicted well-being and explained more variance than all Big Five traits combined. The evaluative factor in personality peer-ratings had no unique relation to well-being. These findings suggest that previous estimates of the relationship between personality traits and well-being have generally been exaggerated. Different methods of accounting for social desirability are discussed.

社会合意性可能会导致自评量度中的虚假关系。本研究试图在人格特质和幸福感测量之间的关系中解开社会期望的反应和内容。社会期望作为评估因素（对问卷项目中的评估内容做出反应的倾向）被操作化。我们收集了 219 名参与者的自我和同伴人格评价以及幸福感自我评价。人格自我评价中的评价因素显着预测了幸福感，并解释了比所有大五特征加起来更多的差异。人格同侪评价中的评价因素与幸福感没有独特的关系。这些发现表明，先前对人格特质与幸福感之间关系的估计通常被夸大了。