A blend of MaLT: Selected contributions from the Methods and Linguistic Theories Symposium 2015

Over the past few decades, linguistic theorizing has benefited from an increasing trend towards empirical methodologies across all disciplines. Methodological know-how – both productive and receptive – has thus become one of the key qualifications for researchers. The empirical turn in linguistics has gone hand in hand with a considerable diversification of research methods. This diversity, which has come to be seen as a strength of linguistics as a field, has also benefited linguistic theory building. The present volume contains selected contributions from the 2015 Methods and Linguistic Theories (MaLT) symposium that address the aforementioned issues from an empirical and/or theoretical perspective. They can be seen as the essence of what MaLT was about, and illustrate the range of topics covered as well as the various concerns and approaches that featured during the event

Economic predictors of differences in interview faking between countries : economic inequality matters, not the state of economy

Many companies recruit employees from different parts of the globe, and faking behavior by potential employees is a ubiquitous phenomenon. It seems that applicants from some countries are more prone to faking compared to others, but the reasons for these differences are largely unexplored. This study relates country-level economic variables to faking behavior in hiring processes. In a cross-national study across 20 countries, participants (N = 3839) reported their faking behavior in their last job interview. This study used the random response technique (RRT) to ensure participants anonymity and to foster honest answers regarding faking behavior. Results indicate that general economic indicators (gross domestic product per capita [GDP] and unemployment rate) show negligible correlations with faking across the countries, whereas economic inequality is positively related to the extent of applicant faking to a substantial extent. These findings imply that people are sensitive to inequality within countries and that inequality relates to faking, because inequality might actuate other psychological processes (e.g., envy) which in turn increase the probability for unethical behavior in many forms