Effect of altered instructions on the MMPI-2 profiles of college students who are not motivated to distort their responses

Research has shown that when the MMPI-2 (Butcher, Dahlstrom, Graham, Telleg en, & Kaemmer, 1989) is administered with instructions designed to make peo ple aware of the validity indexes and when people are encouraged to respond honestly rather than invalidate the test through defensiveness, their scor es on validity scales suggest a more candid responding. Before such modifie d administration procedures can be broadly used to increase the validity of the MMPI (Hathaway & McKinley, 1943) profiles. it is necessary to have mor e information about the effect of the altered instructions on test performa nce of people in general. This study involved administering the MMPI-2 to a group of 218 "normals" (college students) with instructions that differed from traditional instructions. Specifically, the test instructions were alt ered to explain more about the test and the presence of validity scales to apprise participants that disingenuous responding can be detected. The resp onses of college students taking the test under altered instructions were c ompared with those of a similar sample of 150 college students who took the test under standard instructions. Although under altered conditions there was a statistically significant tendency for measures assessing defensivene ss (L, K, and S) to be lower for some participants (women but not men), the differences were trivial. Modified instructions made little practical diff erence in test performance when people who were not motivated to deceive on the test were informed of the presence of validity checks on the test.