Marlowe–Crowne Social Desirability Scale — Short Form (Form C)

This is Reynolds's (1982) Form C, the standard 13-item true/false short form of the Marlowe–Crowne Social Desirability Scale (Crowne & Marlowe, 1960). It measures socially desirable responding — the tendency to describe oneself in an overly favorable, socially approved light — and is often administered alongside substantive questionnaires to gauge that response style.

The instrument is public domain; scores are best read as a response-style indicator, high scores flagging a presentation-management tendency rather than a personality problem.

The notes below are reproduced from the platform's psychometrics register for this instrument — the same source-cited reliability, validity, and norms text that accompanies its downloadable report.

Reynolds (1982) developed Form C as a 13-item short form of the 33-item Marlowe-Crowne Social Desirability Scale and reported a Kuder-Richardson (KR-20) internal-consistency reliability of .76 for Form C, with a correlation of .93 between Form C and the full 33-item scale.

The parent Marlowe-Crowne scale (Crowne & Marlowe, 1960) indexes socially desirable responding -- the tendency to answer in an overly favorable, socially approved direction. Reynolds (1982) showed the Form C short form retains strong convergence with the full scale, supporting its use as a brief index of socially desirable responding / need for approval.

There is no diagnostic cutoff: the 0-13 total is a continuous index of socially desirable responding, with higher scores indicating a stronger tendency to respond in a socially approved direction. No population norms are attached here (none matching this exact verbatim short form are reproduced), so the report shows the raw total and per-item mean only.

“It is sometimes hard for me to go on with my work if I am not encouraged.”

Illustrative only. During administration items are presented one screen-set at a time; response-key direction is never shown to respondents.

Item responses are summed within each scale (reverse-keyed items recoded first) and expressed as a percent of the maximum possible score. No normative percentile is applied — there is no verbatim-matched published norm for this exact item set.

Reynolds, W. M. (1982). Development of reliable and valid short forms of the Marlowe–Crowne Social Desirability Scale. Journal of Clinical Psychology, 38(1), 119–125.

Marlowe–Crowne Social Desirability Scale, Short Form C (Reynolds, W. M., 1982). Public domain; free for clinical and research use with attribution.