TOWARDS THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE TRUTHFUL COMMUNICATION SCALE

Abstract

Honesty plays an important role in our lives as it is the medium from which truth is ascertained. Research also indicates honesty to be a distinct and influential factor in the personality trait lexicon. Despite this, most honesty research has focused on situational rule compliance propriety related to cheating/stealing behaviors and not on one’s dispositional propensity to truthfully communicate between these incentivized conditions. Additionally, existing scales which ostensibly measure honesty were developed with a bottom-up lexical approach without strong direct conceptual focus on truthful communication nor without a trait’s full social/cognitive explanatory components. Thus, the purpose of this thesis was to develop a full trait scale to measure one's dispositional tendency to truthfully communicate. Through a series of content validity and participant studies, a total of 15 items were developed and validated through the Quantifying Construct Validity procedure resulting in the Truthful Communication Scale. This scale will allow researchers to better understand the causes, correlates, and individual differences associated with truthfully communicating.