Social Desirability Bias: Experimental Evidence on Reporting Parental Practices

Measurement reliability has become a central concern, particularly regarding the accuracy and truthfulness of responses in the outcome variables. Ensuring reliable survey measurements remains a crucial challenge, underscoring the need for improved methodologies to elicit honest responses. This paper aims to contribute to this crucial topic. We do this by analyzing social desirability bias in the reporting of parenting practices through survey questions. We develop a method to experimentally identify this bias by purposely inducing social desirability in questions on feeding practices through a random information provision on best practices. Our results show a treatment effect of -0.160 standard deviations in the reporting of children’s ultra-processed food consumption, in line with the presence of social desirability bias. We find a larger bias for women, less educated individuals, caregivers who believe child development is not malleable to parental investment, and those with risk preferences above the median. Although the Marlowe-Crowne scale positively correlates with our experimental measure of social desirability bias, we show that an heterogeneous effect analysis by this variable does not fully remove the issue.