LeRoy A. Stone, Ph.D., ABPP (Forensic Diplomate)
Harpers Ferry, West Virginia
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In the last few years, the great growth and popularity of online dating services sites has grown exponentially. However, along with this growth the possibility of becoming a victim of a scam, suffering from economic, physical and psychological damage, as well as being simply taken advantage of, has kept pace. A small percentage of the great many online dating sites, in response, now offer some remedies or hoped for solutions to this problem of potential criminality; mainly these are the conducting of criminality-focused background checks that sometimes include a check for marital status. Also employed by a very few online dating sites are the use of personality tests so that customers of the dating services can be somehow matched or compatibility or for some similar such concepts. In a number of the larger personality tests, that are not infrequently used by psychologists for a very wide variety of purposes, a few of them, especially those that are more often used for mental health evaluation purposes, do contain subscales that are alleged to measure a propensity for lying or giving deceptive directional responses to test items, which is known as a response bias.. With a few of the more well-known large personality inventories (tests), some even contain other additional subscales designed to measure other types of response bias, such as 'carelessness'. In the past several months, there has appeared in the online dating evaluation market, a 'new' psychological test, the Personnel Security Standards Psychological Questionnaire (PSSPQ), This testing instrument was designed and further developed in the past couple decades for a quite different usage, it was developed to accurately predict eventual success/failure to be governmentally granted high-level security clearance status. The PSSPQ was developed by a psychologist who, several years ago, retired from Federal Service when being the Chief Research Psychologist in the USA's then largest intelligence agency. In security clearance granting usage, the PSSPQ has been shown to make accurate predictions at about the 95+% level. In general the PSSPQ measures about a dozen different aspects of what can be understood as a general status of personal honesty/integrity. It was discovered that the PSSPQ could also be very helpful in evaluating potential dating prospects in the online dating situation arena. In fact, use of the PSSPQ for this purpose was found to result in quite desirable e screening arrangement, which is, when considered, to be not too different from the security clearance vetting type situation. Although the PSSPQ offers a number of different subscale, ratios of scales, and discriminate function scores, one of the judged most important is the PSSPQ's LIE Scale.
Competition between the larger and most successful online dating sites has become rather heated at the present time (i.e., early 2007). In fact, the True.com site owners, who seemingly are also known as the Integrated Knowledge Systems have been quite active in attempting to get legislation passed that would benefit their online dating arrangement over those of their competitors. To over-simplify their situation, True.com, according to a recent, Consumers Report article (December 2006, pages 43-45), "it's the only site that checks for criminals and married applicant." True.com is apparently using this to argue, to various state legislatures and the like, that other online dating sites really are not adequately protecting their customers fro fraud and other sources of harm. In a very interesting Internet web page, Dr. Rense Lange, who is apparently affiliated with Integrated Knowledge Systems, has in great detail pointed out many of the weaknesses of many online dating sites and further argues the superiority of the Truecom system. Dr. Lange offers a very accurate description of the use of lie scales, prior to the introduction of the PSSPQ into online dating evaluations. I will offer in the below paragraphs a full quote of a couple paragraphs presented by Dr. Lange. Because his discussion of online dating dangers is rather excellent and it demonstrates a high knowledge of the subject, the URL address for his full presentation is, as recorded: http://www.true.com/safer_dating/true_faq.asp.
According to Rense Lange, Ph.D., of Integrated Knowledge Systems:
A well-known online dating service provider presumably relies on the use
of "lie" type scales to
target those who are emotionally unhealthy, or otherwise undesirable as
dates by their customer
Unfortunately, as is the case for many online dating services, this particular
company does not
provide any information concerning their tests that would allow an independent
evaluation of their
success in obtaining this goal. In the best case, this dating site provider
might use methods
analogous to those found in widely used, highly standardized and well-validated
tests.
For instance, the MMPI contains the "L Scale" which was originally constructed
to detect a
deliberate attempt on the part of the respondent to present him/herself
in a favorable light. People
who present high L scale scores are not willing to admit even minor shortcomings
and are
deliberately trying to present themselves in a very favorable way. Better
educated, brighter, more
sophisticated people from higher social classes tend to score lower on
the L scale. In addition, the
MMPI "F Scale" was originally developed to detect deviant or atypical ways
of responding to test
items, and this scale may also be an indicator of degree of psychopathology.
However, this requires
that profile validity can be established – i.e., the
responses to other MMPI questions have to be
consistent with this position. Of course, such supporting evidence would
not be available unless the
entire MMPI is administered and interpreted by an experienced clinician.
Accordingly, while the
MMPI's L and F Scales are among the best validated indicators of psychopathology,
they cannot
function in isolation. Thus, their inclusion in tests like those administered
by this company would
not provide any guarantees that undesirable individuals are identified.
Although details concerning this site's tests are lacking, it would appear
that "lie" type scales
used by the site in all likelihood address simple response biases. In many
cases, the biases that are
identified reflect no more than social desirability, the respondent need
not be cognizant of such
biases, and such biases need not reflect social deviance or psychopathology.
A reading of the above couple paragraphs, would get a good deal of agreement and approval by a good many clinical psychologists who frequently employs tests such as the MMPI, which has been focused upon by Dr. Lange. The builders of such tests quite clearly have been mainly interested in developing tests that would be most useful with assisting in the diagnoses of mental health disorders and mainly with people who are experiencing troubles with living and hence come into contact with mental health professionals. The MMPI was not standardized using populations who would be characterized by elevated intellect; in fact, those having diagnosable mental disorders generally could safely be regarded as most likely functioning in the below average to not much more than the average intellect level. Consequently, the Lie scale, such as that in the MMPI, was not especially designed for average to superior intellectual levels. Research conducted on the MMPI's Lie Scale and intelligence, shows a rather high negative direction correlation between the two variables. This simply means that the LIE Scales' purpose is rather transparent and the smarter one is the more likely he/she can correctly determine what it was intended o measure. So, if one is working with persons who are functioning in the high intelligence range, a low MMPI Lie Scale score can be based on a number of different causations. It might simply reflect a high intelligence, high social desirability, a non liar, or any combination of the three - this situation is not very good for making diagnoses. Also, with most clinical psychology personality tests (i.e., such as the MMPI) their Lie Scales were never standardized again any actual clinical group of known liars. In a sense, these Lie Scales are really 'second-class' scales, they really are not diagnostic of any known clinical groups, as are most of the more major scales on the various tests.
In great contrast, the PSSPQ's LIE Scale was constructed by a psychologist who had an unusually high level of study and work experience in psychological evaluation conducted to establish personnel security standards, had an unusually strong background in psychometrics, conducted research the detection of lying as well as with the designed of interrogation practices, and maintained (for almost 25 years) a private practice totally specializing in forensic psychology. In this latter activity, he had earned Diplomate status from the American Board of Professional Psychology (ABPP). The PSSPQ was actually developed to predict the governmental granting/denial of high-level security clearance status right at the very beginning of the evaluation process which typically takes about a year and a half to complete. The PSSPQ has been repeated found to predict granting/denial at about a 95+% accuracy level. As a result, right from the very beginning of development, the LIE Scale for this instrument was regarded as being the most important scale in the dozen or so scales that comprise the PSSPQ. More attention was put into its development than for any of the other particular scales. The LIE Scale was designed to be used with persons who were intellectually functioning at the average to superior intelligence levels. Those who comprised the standardization groups, during the test's development, were heavily comprised of physicists, engineers, computer scientists, high-level linguists, mathematicians, etc. etc. Few were in a standization group without at least possessing a bachelor's degree. The standardization group(s) all were quite variable with the distinction that most in the groups were in the high end of intelligence. When scores on the PSSPQ LIE Scale were correlated with measured intellect, the obtained correlations, in all studied samples, has been seen to be statistically nonsignificantly different from zero; in other words, there has been found a zero order correlation between LIE scale scores and intelligence. This nonrelationship is NOT found generally with the Lie type scales that have been constructed as parts of most of the more widely used personality tests or inventories; such as the one which is part of the MMPI. In fact, Dr. Stone did publish a paper on this very matter; he found a statistically significant negative direction correlation coefficient descriptive of the relationship between measured intelligence and MMPI Lie Scale scores. The research report that is descriptive of this finding can be seen by clinking on Here.
Dr.
Lange's negative comments of psychometric lie scales would seem to be especially
aimed at the eHarmony online dating site, as they offer use of a Lie scale
that quite accurately fits Dr. Lange's comments. As noted in the
just prior paragraph, the PSSPQ's LIE Scale is, based upon its construction/development,
as well as its general purpose, rather different from the more usual psychological
test Lie scales found in just about most large personality type tests or
inventories. After all, the PSSPQ was built right from its very beginning
for use with persons possessing elevated levels of intelligence.
It was especially designed, even when employed with very bright people,
to hide its purpose from test takers. In other words, its purpose
is not believed to be transparent to those responding to the scale's items.
This was not an easy to accomplish achievement, it took all of Dr. Stone's
unique experiential background plus a great deal
of research time.
It should be expected that the PSSPQ can and will do a very credible job when employed to evaluate the generalized personal honesty/integrigy of persons who might be attempting to 'connect' with others in an online dating site. It can be easily argued that the motivations for providing false or misleading descriptions of oneself in an online dating type situation can be easily expected to be less well-thought-out and are weaker than with another individual who is providing false or misleading description of him/herself in other to secure a high-level governmen granted security clearance. Also, it can be added that this latter individual could be expected to be applying for governmental employment at a level that would be commercerate with having had college graduation or higher educational achievement. With this said, a question can be asked - does the PSSPQ really spot or identify persons who are lying in their self descriptions which they provided to the government prior to or during evaluative processing for high-level security clearance status? The answer is clearly YES. For a full explanation of this, see the published journal article that describes, in great detail,, how the PSSPQ was employed to identfy lying on the part of a major traitorous US citizen spy who was caught in 1984, the so-called "Year of the Spy." Thispublished article can be found at: http://www.home.earthlink.net/~lastone2/peltonspsspq.html. This spy was requested, while serving his life sentence in a US Penatenuary, to respond to the PSSPQ "as he believed he would have if he had been administered the questionnaire while applying for employment with the US intelligence agency which later employed [him]." The results of this testing of a real spy with the PSSPQ revealed that the instrument would have spotted him as being a liar in regard to him describing his past personal history. Had he been actually administered the PSSPQ prior to his sensitive federal employment, he most likely would never have been hired in the first place. It should be said that this time, that this particular spy is regarded by intelligence agents as being of superior intelligence. With this said, the PSSPQ still was able to identify him as being a liar. Think of this - if the PSSPQ's LIE Scale can 'trap' an extremely intelligence traitorous USA citizen spy, who was eventually caught and who was given a life sentence, by showing that he was a liar when attempting to provide deceptive self-descriptions, then don't you think that this same LIE Scale can evaluate your potential dating prospect into revealing whether he/she is attempting to deceive you regarding him/herself.
If the tool has been devised, based upon a couple decades of research (conducted by a very sentior psychologist, who when he retired from Federal employment, he was the Chief Research Psychologist with the USA's then largest intelligence agency), that actally has shown that it can 'catch' persons when they are first applying for sensitive employment (i.e., requiring the granting of high-level security clearances) long before they are caught for spying, think how this tool might perform for other individuals who try to hide their deceptiveness, especially regarding providing descriptions of themselves. Remember that the most major and powerful component part of the PSSPQ is this instrument's LIE Scale. As was suggested at the very beginning of this presentation, the LIE Scale, in the PSSPQ, has no other equal among all the other Lie Scales that are component parts of a goodly number of widely employed psychological personality tests and inventories.
There is one other matter
that at least should be mentioned regarding the evaluative qualities of
the PSSPQ. Prediction scores (i.e., based upon the discriminant function
statistical paradigm) based solely on PSSPQ scoring information has been
repeated shown to not only be related to eventual granting or denial of
governmental security clarance status, but it has just about always been
shown that the prediction accuracy generally is no lower than at the 95+%
accuracy level. It can be inferred safely from this that there exists
a high correlation between PSSPQ discriminate function scores and eventual
success/failure to be granted security clearance status. In contrast,
there exists no published reports that indicate any such relationships
between other psychological tests' scores with eventual success/failure
to be granted security clearance status. Obviously, the PSSPQ does
what it was designed to do - it obviously is an excellent test for personal
honesty/integrity, which is the believed attribute(s) that must be possessed
in order that a security clearance be granted to the involved individual.
LET THE PSSPQ WORK FOR YOU. For more information regarding the PSSPQ,
including directions for you using this instrument to evaluate one or more
of your potential online dating prospects, click on
HERE.
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This site last updated 21 January 2007 Copyrighted 2001-2007 Dr. LeRoy A. Stone [PSSPQ] U.S.Post Office Box 395, Harpers Ferry, WV 25425-0395, Email us at: lastone2@earthlink.net In the event that you might attempt to send an Email to Dr. Stone, you may initially be blocked by his 'spam blocker' and in order to successful communicate with him you may be required to request his spam blocker (which is currently set on 'High') to allow you through; sorry for this but the amount of spam being sent to this Email address has been incredible. L.A. Stone "Home" page | PSSPQ "Home" page | Top of This Page | Dr. Stone's CV | Dr. Stone's Publications | Dating Dangers Highlighted | PSSPQ Offers the Best Protection | |Lie Scales Discussion| For You Guys | For You Gals | Some Dating Sites Recommended| Honesty/Integrity Certificate |Free Dating Prospect Screening |Basis for PSSPQ Icon Selection | |