Abstract
When conducting research on reception of cultural products, sociologists often have to rely on receivers’ accounts. This brings a particularly salient problem in these studies, namely, social desirability or the tendency of individuals to present themselves to the researcher in a favourable manner regarding social norms and mores. Mobilizing the particular case of a research on self-help books readers involving fifty-five qualitative interviews, this article investigates (a) how social desirability is manifested in these qualitative interviews, (b) what may be its heuristic relevance for research; and (c) the risks that it carries for the data’s validity. The article shows how people’s tendency to present themselves in a favourable light is very instructive as to the norms that individuals project, but it also pays attention to the ways social desirability threatens the material’s status and proposes some ways of coping with it.
Introduction: The Difficulty of Studying the Reception of Cultural Products
Working on the issues of the reception of cultural content (books, television series, works of art, etc.) inevitably entails tackling the issue of what may become usable materials in the research process. What raw materials may be used by a sociological perspective that claims to rely on empirical work? We are forced to admit that the researcher has very few direct means of coming to grips with the subject. Reading, as a typical form of reception, is above all a mental process that limits a hypothetical observation to provide only highly fragmentary information about physical elements (about the items that one may come across, for example, in surveys on the time spent in front of the telly, the number of books read, etc.). And this does not allow for the fact that the observation probably modifies whatever it is describing.
Since receiving cultural content is first of all a matter of the senses, of feelings and sensations that are inaccessible to the direct observer, the researcher who wants to explore the black box of reception is forced to rely (for better and for worse) on the accounts of these processes that the receivers themselves give. Having them speak, provide explicit statements, and come back to what happens is indispensable. These accounts may be produced spontaneously by the receivers (in the course of discussions, correspondence, or even a personal diary). However, they are usually elicited by the investigator, as in the classic cases of questionnaires or interviews, in an interaction in which the investigator is clearly at the helm. Besides the fact that the utterances of those whom Barker and Petley call ‘real enthusiasts’ (2001: 7) seem to be a must, the irreducibly artificial situation of the research interview has many advantages, not the least of which is the possibility given to the researcher to react to the interviewee’s remarks. Since s/he controls the interaction, even in the least guided forms of interview, the researcher effectively has a series of levers and techniques at her/his command to be certain to obtain the clearest, most relevant, and most reliable information possible.
However, in the specific case of analysing reception, relying on the receivers’ accounts is not problem-free. First of all, the reception process is fraught with what we can call, along with Lindlof and Grodin, ‘elusiveness in everyday life’ (1990). The consumers of cultural content, such as readers, for example, may remember very well that a book pleased them to the point of marking them for the rest of their lives, that another book shed light on a very specific situation in their life, and that a third book gave them the impression of being understood without for all that remembering the titles of the books in question, their authors, and even less so their specific contents. The mnesic trace seems to be emotional, whereas the cognitive content of the message fades. If the investigator presses the interviewee for specific facts, the interviewee is very likely to reconstruct them. That is what Janice Radway understood during her research on the women who read romantic fiction: ‘Because the women always responded to my query about their reasons for reading with comments about the pleasure of the act itself rather than about their liking for the particulars of the romantic plot, I soon realized I would have to give up my obsession with textual features and narrative details if I wanted to understand their view of the romance reading’ (Radway, 1984: 86). What is more, readers often tend not to consider to be reading what is not classically defined as such. So, reading user’s instructions, a horoscope, or even advertising is usually not reported by the subjects themselves (Lahire, 2005: 155).
The reception experience thus seems to dwell in aspects that are not amenable to quantification and hard to formalize. That can even have consequences on the reader’s abilities to formulate an account of an activity perceived to be reading. Indeed, according to Thévenot (1999), it is possible to say that reception occurs in a context of familiarity with the environment in which it is difficult to express a life experience in words. How do you tell someone how a book moved you to tears? What words do you use to say that another book disturbed you profoundly (Lichterman, 1992)? Due to its artificiality, the research interview goads the reader into formalizing, perhaps for the first time, experiences that s/he had not expressed in spoken or written words until then, or only very vaguely. The interview inevitably takes part in constructing the data that it collects.
As important as this problem is, it has the advantage of affecting the quality of the data quite visibly: The researcher can quite easily become aware of this when the interviewee searches for words, utters only commonplaces, or simply remains silent. This is not always the case of another particularly salient problem in the study of cultural content’s reception, namely, social desirability. According to the classical definition, social desirability is ‘the pervasive tendency of individuals to present themselves in the most favourable manner relative to prevailing social norms and mores’ (King and Bruner, 2000: 80). Individuals project the norms that they believe are applied by their interlocutors, by the milieu that the latter represent, or by society in general, and try to comply with them, even if that means bending the reality of their practices or thoughts. This process is likely to kick in in two cases in particular: first, when there is great social dissymmetry between an interviewee on a low rung of the socio-economic ladder and an interviewer with a high social ranking; and second, when the interview concerns a subject that will force the individual to tackle practices, thoughts, or preferences that s/he thinks or knows are not legitimized by society and thus are burdened by a strong normative component.
This notion, which comes from social psychology (especially personality studies), can be likened to that of the ‘legitimacy effect’ in sociology. The notion of the ‘legitimacy effect’ was developed by Pierre Bourdieu in his research into cultural distinction. In a dialogue with Roger Chartier, Bourdieu spells it out as follows: In fact, the most elementary question of sociological questioning clearly tells us that the statements about what people say they read are highly unreliable due to what I call the legitimacy effect: As soon as you ask someone what he is reading, what he hears is, ‘Is what I read actually legitimate literature?’ When you ask him, ‘Do you like music?’ he hears, ‘Do you like classical music?’ That is a taste that may be admitted. And what he answers is not what he truly listens to or reads, but what in whatever he happens to have read or heard seems legitimate to him. (Bourdieu, 1993: 273-74, my translation)
Whilst social desirability seems to be a more pernicious problem than that of the respondents’ abilities to remember and to recount their reception experiences, this is also because it does not affect the quality of the data as much as it affects their status: This is what is made suspect at the end of the day. In other words, social desirability threatens the validity of the entire set of indicators that one may manage to construct from the subjects’ discourse.
The aim of this article is not to propose another overview of the techniques for reducing the bias linked to social desirability (for that, see, for example, Nederhof, 1985, Moors et al., 2014). Moreover, most of these techniques concern highly formalized types of investigation that are close to quantitative surveys (e.g., playing with the answer scale, changing the order of questions, etc. – some insights into this in connection with online surveys can be found in Frippiat and Marquis, 2010). Here we shall investigate the phenomenon of social desirability via a qualitative survey on the reading of self-help texts in order to circumscribe more precisely (a) how social desirability is manifested in qualitative interviews on the reception of cultural objects; (b) what its heuristic relevance for research may be; and (c) the risks that it carries for the data’s validity. In the first part I shall show why the case of self-help literature is particularly interesting for handling this subject. In the second part I shall present the way social desirability is expressed in my interviews of self-help book readers. In the third part I shall show why this social desirability is instructive regarding the norms that the readers project; their degree of awareness of sociological criticism of the self-help world, and, finally the way they are able to reverse the stigma of being self-help readers as they perceive it.
Reading Self-help Books
Self-help books have become increasingly popular in the past few decades. Whereas the book market as a whole is in a crisis, self-help books are one of the segments that have weathered the storm best, or even progressed (Marquis, 2014). Some self-help books have even sold in impressive numbers: tens of millions of copies in the United States and hundreds of thousands of copies in the French-speaking world. To understand the reasons of such success and in line with the precepts of reception studies, I felt it would be relevant to question the main people concerned, namely, the readers themselves, without limiting the research to the texts. As Livingstone points out, ‘Having the text in front of you does not tell you what it means to its audience’ (1998: 35). So, the research referred to here required conducting fifty-five comprehensive interviews (Kaufmann, 1996) of one and a half to two hours on average. The sample may be termed self-selected, for, as no database was available from which it was possible to select self-help readers randomly, I recruited my subjects by leaving flyers inviting self-help readers to participate in the research in several general bookstores in the French-speaking part of Belgium. This sample definitely cannot make any claims of representativeness 1 . However, that does not affect the issue under investigation.
There are at least two interconnected reasons why interviews of self-help book readers are especially relevant to examining the issue of social desirability: the difficulty of defining what self-help literature is and, next, its bad reputation among social scientists.
If we take the distinction, drawn from linguistics, between an emic definition (that is to say, the definition used by the people studied) and an etic definition (the definition formalized in the language of social science), we quickly realise that it is impossible to give a definitive etic characterisation of a self-help book. The authors who have tried to do so by invoking a defining criterion (e.g., Dolby, 2005) have all been thwarted by the diversity of forms that the genre can take. To make matters worse, what English-speakers call ‘self-help’ does not necessarily match what French-speakers call développement personnel (personal development), so great is the divide between the cultural contexts from which these two concepts stem (Ehrenberg, 2010). 2 To avoid the pitfalls of labels, it seems much more interesting to conceive of self-help reading as an experience connecting a reader and a book rather than as a material object. However, regardless of the perspective chosen in the interactions with the readers, words must be used to communicate about the subject of the research. So as not to bias their perceptions of self-help, I thus did not provide any definitions of self-help literature. Instead, I asked the respondents to tell me about their experiences with self-help texts (as they defined them) that had marked them. In the course of these fifty-five interviews I counted no fewer than 370 different references, ranging from standard self-help books to the Bible, with sociological works in between. This difficulty of knowing what we are speaking about is not solely cognitive. It also possesses a normative component. Indeed, readers wait to learn what the researcher has in mind when s/he uses the expression ‘self-help’ in order to present their relations with self-help books in a certain way. The following interaction is eloquent in this respect. During one interview at which I arrived carrying the French translation of an American best-seller representing a rather caricatured version of self-help, i.e. Stephen Covey’s The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, the French-speaking woman being interviewed constantly told me that the self-help books that she read definitely had nothing to do with that ‘American-style’ of self-help literature. In her view, if ‘that is what I meant by “self-help”’, then she wasn’t into self-help. Because self-help is a fuzzy term for an object that is just as fuzzy, most of the time it gives interviewees an opportunity to position themselves. In so doing, it increases the probability of discourse tinged by social desirability.
The second reason why the reception of self-help books is a relevant subject of study has to do with self-help literature’s (bad) reputation, not only in general, but especially in the social sciences. It is striking to see that social scientists seem to have particular difficulty talking about the success of self-help books without denouncing them (although a tiny minority of authors – such as Anthony Giddens (1992) – seem to delight in their success). Simply put, we can distinguish two analytical models used by both French- and English-speaking authors: the decline model and the power model. The former turns the success of self-help books into the sign and agent of a decline in society and the quality of life of its individual members (e.g., Gauchet, 2002, in France and Lasch, 2000, in 1981, 1980, in the U.S.). According to this model, people are becoming narcissistic and individualistic and no longer succeed in coming together to form a true society. The second model, which stems from Foucault’s school of thought, sees self-help literature as a new way of exerting power over individuals that takes on the trappings of freedom but is very constraining nonetheless, since it ‘forces [us] to be free’ (Rose, 1999). Moreover, the writings that belong to this second current tend to see the reader as basically passive and dominated by the text. Borrowing from Critical Theory (Adorno, 2000) and the hypodermic needle model (Berger, 1995), they conceive of reading as a form of swallowing content devoid of all filters, i.e. what is in the text ends up in the reader’s mind and animates the reader like a puppet (Radway, 1986, Marquis, 2015). This characteristic, which makes self-help an object and practice that enjoy little sociological esteem, makes the interviews all the more sensitive to social desirability.
Social Desirability at Work in the Interviews
How did the individuals who, in taking up the invitation deposited in bookstores, accepted the label of ‘self-help book reader’ talk about their readings? Here I shall propose an insight into the concrete consequences of social desirability in interviews based on three indicators: first, the changes in the respondents’ attitudes in the course of the interviews; next, the ways that they created an opposition between a ‘good’ and a ‘bad’ type of reader; and, finally, the construction of another contrast between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ self-help texts.
The Defensive Ritual in the Interview
Observing how the interview unfolds and the changes in tone, attitude, and even the utterances made in the course of the interaction is a good way to shed light on the investigation that the interviewee conducts of the interviewer. What does the interviewer, who belongs to a milieu that usually decries the practice, think about reading self-help books? What will I be able to tell her/him? What image does and will s/he have of me? In order to forestall the problem of an investigation that was likely to stretch on interminably, I opted for the approach that is generally recommended in the literature, i.e. an introductory explanation of the researcher’s aims (Foddy, 1993). So, I explained briefly to the reader that I felt that, by concentrating on the text in self-help books, the social sciences had not given the readers the place that they deserved in analysing the subject, whilst doing my utmost to refrain from putting across a positive or negative assessment of the phenomenon. The interview proper was always kicked off by the same question: ‘Do you remember the first self-help book that you read?’ Despite this precaution and the factual first question, I was able to discern what could be likened to a ritual in close to three-quarters of the interviews, namely, the individuals began with defensive clarifications of the way they considered self-help literature in light of what they perceived to be the general opinion of it. For example, when I gave one 37 year-old woman the chance to speak after asking my first question, she gave the following explanation: So, I disagree completely with the idea that when you read [self-help] books you withdraw into yourself, because I think that you can’t go out to others and communicate with others unless you can communicate well with yourself, and that is also the message of these books, in part. So, I find these books are very positive for society and they do not cause people to retreat into their shells. But I’d start by saying, since there are people who find that truly individualistic, that I think that before you can reach out to others, want to help others, think about others, and everything, we all have the right to think about ourselves first and to construct ourselves, because if you reach out to others, if you enter life without having taken the time to wonder about yourself, to construct yourself, then you achieve nothing.
So, in the interview of a 45 year-old woman that lasted about 90 minutes, although my interviewee had clearly stated that she read self-help books – that was why she had accepted the interview –, she stressed time and again in the course of the first three-quarters of the interview the fact that self-help literature ‘got on her nerves’, in particular because it was a vector for promoting individualism. But self-help really gets on my nerves, it’s in fashion, it’s a catch-all, it’s trendy and all that. That irritates me.…I tell myself that it’s always the ‘Quest for Personal Well-being’. It has to stop at some point. I read that book six times in one year. Last year I went through periods of discovery about my own life. The words on the first thirty pages were truly the words that I needed to read and to hear. It gave me the impression of being able to walk on water.
“Good” and “Bad” Self-help Literature
In most of the cases, however, such a release, which, one could hope, might lead to a more authentic description of practices and less controlled use of the interviewee’s individual representations, occurred very gradually, rather than suddenly. In reality, all of the people whom I interviewed proceeded to create an opposition between good and bad self-help literature.
Whereas they agreed to consider themselves readers of the first category, they most forcefully rejected all contact with the second. The criterion that made it possible, in the readers’ eyes, to separate the grain from the chaff was, as the preceding excerpts suggest, the possibly ‘individualistic’ aspect that the book in question might contain. Not content to pinpoint and utter this criticism, my respondents refuted it whilst adopting it. They wanted to show the researcher belonging to a milieu that had produced so many statements criticising the potential effects of self-help literature that, of course, they were ‘against’ the creeping individualism in our societies, the presence of which they did not contest, but felt that good self-help literature was unfairly put on the stand by this reproach, a reproach that could only be the consequence of too superficial an understanding of this literature.
Good self-help literature is thus that which, far from participating in the withdrawal into one’s shell, in individualism, in the desertion of the public arena, contributes to creating a better world in which individuals develop their potential first in order to be able to ‘radiate’ for the good of others afterwards. However, none of the interviewees denied the fact that ‘another’ type of self-help literature existed, one that was very likely to be guilty of the evil ascribed to it. Instead, this second type of self-help literature was kept at a distance, and they spoke of it only as a theoretical possibility. The titles that the interviewees mentioned were often vague and caricatured, representative of ‘American-style’ literature, and mentioned as a foil to show that their openness to self-help books was never that of swallowing everything and anything; that they were indeed selective self-help readers. (Woman, 35 years old) …I don’t know why, introspection [is not for me]. There’s a book called something like I’ve Decided to Pamper Myself or Pamper Yourself but I’m not attracted by that because I don’t like it. I find that the ‘I, me’ bit quickly turns into self-centredness, and self-centredness is terrible.
The “Good” and “Bad” Reader
In parallel to the construction of an opposition between good self-help books, which are read, and bad self-help books, which are rejected, the interviews also revealed the creation of a strong dichotomy between a good and a bad reader in which the bad reader was given the reverse characteristics of the good reader. The good reader depicted by the respondents is responsible, is critical, does not believe everything that s/he reads, and accomplishes a major feat of sifting through the messages. In contrast, the bad reader is a completely passive receiver who is worked like putty by messages with a normative potential to which s/he is totally oblivious.
This dichotomous construction refers to a well-known phenomenon in the study of communication, namely, the ‘third person effect’ (Davison, 1983). According to this phenomenon, interviewees often believe that there is a third person who is much more subject to the media’s effects than they are. We thus find here a structure similar to what could be seen with the preceding dichotomy. The readers interviewed in this study did not deny that there could be influenceable people on whom self-help books might have potentially harmful effects, but whilst they espoused this argument, they explained why it definitely did not apply to them.
Two steps in building this opposition can be identified. First, the individuals stressed the features of their reading behaviour that could undeniably be connected to the idea of the good receiver. Without their being asked, they urged me to consider their active and critical attitudes to self-help literature. They often boasted of never being totally engrossed in their readings and the ease with which they could step away from, even do without the books’ messages. In their opinion, they never receive the entire message. Instead, they select what is interesting and believable and take great care not to apply it like a recipe. In a nutshell, they tried to show themselves to be ‘autonomous, responsible readers’.
Finally, in order to strengthen the opposition between her/his good way of reading and that of other people, each individual whom I met presented, even if only by implication, a theoretical example of the bad receiver that was characterised by the absence of the qualities that the ‘good readers’ attributed to themselves. This figure was a hypothesis, the veracity of which they did not doubt, and sometimes even served to characterise (often remote) acquaintances. This figure was obviously what the interviewees used to justify their adoption of the critical arguments that they turned against others (the third party). Bad readers, in their view, were first of all inactive, transparent receivers without critical minds and unable to separate good from bad self-help literature; people who ‘swallowed’ everything that they read. Their inability to step back from what they read make them particularly vulnerable to some of the phoney promises of self-help literature, promises that the interviewees, on the contrary, claimed to see for what they were, without giving them too much credence. These bad readers think that the book can provide them with simple explanations on how to live their lives, whereas the world is of course infinitely more complicated. They are searching for a Holy Grail or simple solution in these books, as if their problems could be solved by a wave of a magic wand. (Man, 32 years old): I think that the problem is that there are lots of people for whom these are not the right sort of book. And I have the impression that for such people, a certain framework is lacking. They will cherry-pick without doing any critical thinking about the act of reading. They will read a hyper-simplified book for the mass market and do three tests to get some hyper-general conclusions, but they’ll stop there and won’t take the necessary critical distance. (Woman, 66 years old): But it’s true that it’s always better to have some intellectual keys. I, for one, realise to what extent you can be conned. I’m happy to have learnt the keys of scientific study, because that enables you to defend yourself from all those who churn out scientific studies. Perhaps if I have such distance, it may be thanks to my education. You don’t have a teacher [guiding you] when you buy those things! They have to be decoded, and when you haven’t got the keys for that, you have a problem.
These self-help ‘consumers’ are also characterised by the fact that they think that they’ve understood everything and are often pretentious. Now, this apparent smugness is a poor mask for a feeling of helplessness, a lack of critical spirit, and even a lack of advancement in life: ‘…if you delve a little into their lives, you’ll see that they are nowhere’ (woman, 44 years old).
In a nutshell, most of the subjects made a point of taking precautions in commencing the interview. This double construction seems also to have participated in a form of reassurance for the respondents, because it enabled them to cope with the tensions between a social normativity of which they were aware and a practice that ran the risk of clashing head-on with such normativity. It thus enabled the respondents to satisfy what Foddy calls their ‘psychological need to be consistent’ (1993: 66). What is more, the stories that the individuals told about good and bad readers and good and bad self-help books constitute what Jeanne Favret-Saada (2009) called ‘exemplary narratives’ in her book on ‘witchcraft in the Bocage’, that is to say, typecast tales that those who engage in certain practices (self-help reading or witchcraft) serve up to people whose positions on their practices they do not know, given that the practitioners know that their practices are potentially socially deviant. They do more than try to settle the matter of what the researcher may think about the respondent. They enable the respondent to wear two hats: that of the self-acknowledged but responsible reader and that of the critic of other readers’ behaviour.
What Social Desirability Enables Us to Learn
When it is identified, people’s tendency to show themselves in a favourable light is very instructive as to the norms that individuals project. It is, moreover, especially striking to notice the affinities that exist between the criteria that the readers use to distinguish good and bad self-help literature and readers and the content of the criticism levelled by social scientists at self-help books and their readers’ positions. The readers seem to know in advance what reproaches a certain legitimate, scholarly culture – ‘sociology’ or ‘the university’, to use their own terms – has made or might make of the self-help phenomenon.
As we have seen, the first distinguishing criterion has to do with self-help books’ potentially individualising and societally threatening nature. This clearly echoes the decline model mentioned above. Most of the people I interviewed knew without my having to suggest it that this discourse was criticised for the withdrawn behaviour that it allegedly caused and the atomised world in which it allegedly participated. The second distinction concerns the reader’s possible passiveness. My respondents knew that the consumers of this type of literature were likely to be denigrated as fanatics or lobotomised zombies who ‘swallowed’ everything that was written. This criterion also echoes criticisms voiced in the social sciences regarding the malleability of the receivers of cultural content from the mass media.
This seems to indicate that there is major porosity, even recursiveness, between the criticism made in social science circles and common sense discourse, to the point that even the readers of self-help books and self-help books themselves seize upon the remarks that critics, especially academic critics, make against them. So, Servan-Schreiber, who is the author of one of the most widely sold self-help books in the French-speaking world in the past twenty years, wrote the following passage attacking in one go both the individualism and the passiveness of the receivers of advertising: Today, we are at the heart of a planetary movement towards ‘psychological’ individualism or ‘personal development’. The great values of this movement are autonomy, independence, freedom, and self-expression. These values have become so central that even advertisers use them to make us buy the same thing as our neighbours whilst making us think that that makes us unique (2005: 260) (my translation).
So, the readers do more than save face. Rather, they proceed with what we could call, along with Goffman (1963), a form of stigma reversal. In other words, in the course of the interview a turnaround of social desirability could be observed. Whereas in the initial stage the norm that the interviewee projected was that of the culture of academia and the ‘establishment’, in respect of which the reader tried to make her/his practice acceptable, in a later stage the criticisms levelled at the practice of reading self-help books by the person’s friends and family and the social sciences alike became a sign of backwardness, of cowardly over-cautiousness, or of self-serving conservatism, whereas the self-help readers became the spearheads of individual and societal progress. [Woman, 37 years old]: …I think that everyone should read self-help books, but you can’t force people to want to delve into themselves, especially since – an author said this – once you’ve taken a step, you can no longer go back, so it’s extremely dangerous. It destabilises, it is not approved of; perhaps that is also why it frightens people. For example, people are lashing out at the various types of alternative medicine, but that’s because there are lobbies and people in place, and it’s the same thing for self-help literature: People don’t want to support it because it’s dangerous. If everyone stops wanting to consume all the rubbish they’re served out and decides that they are going to work half of the time and join co-operatives to grow their own stuff [the rest of the time], well, some people are not going to like that!
Conclusions
A form of social desirability seems impregnable for a great many research subjects that require the gathering of discourse, especially for those that share the characteristic of getting individuals to position themselves with regard to norms. Moreover, we would be fooling ourselves to hope to arrive at a pure and cut-and-dry description of social activities, if only because these descriptions necessarily use polysemic social categories or those that carry judgements. Along with Wittgenstein (2001), we can say that our language games and the grammars that structure them and in which we are irremediably bathed reveal our forms of life. These language games are both subjects of analysis in their own right (for example, studying occurrences of the ‘critical attitude’ lexicon in the discourse of readers describing their practices) and the only tools at individuals’ disposal to describe their practices. Here we find the proposition made by Giddens (1984) to consider sociology to be a double hermeneutics: a (scholarly) interpretation of other (lay) interpretations.
Social desirability challenges the collected material’s validity understood as an indicator’s ability to reflect what one is actually trying to measure (Babbie, 1995), for example, reading behaviour. Taking it into consideration forces the researcher to wonder about the role that s/he wants this material to play in her/his proof, to ask, ‘What does it tell me about?’ and ‘What status does it have?’ ‘May I consider this discourse to be an objective descriptor of a thought, action, or experience, or must I, on the contrary, disqualify it on this first level to consider it rather to be, for example, fragmentary speech, a lie, or a revealer of social rationales that attest to the actor’s relative inability to realise the reality of her/his situation?’
Finally, social desirability is a complex problem because it is situated at the crossroads of two often separated forms of non-validity: non-validity with an intentional dominant and non-validity with a non-intentional dominant. The former, which is close to the differential psychologists’ other-deception (Tournois et al., 2000), concerns cases in which, to please someone else or to fit a social norm, a person distorts reality in her/his remarks. In other words, s/he lies, more or less deliberately, to her/his speaking partner. The latter, which is close to self-deception, concerns the cases in which individuals deceive themselves in good faith. In sociology one will say that they are seized by a form of illusion or heteronomy. They think that they are describing their real practices, but actually have no access thereto. Social desirability and individual desirability seem to be two sides of the same coin, for the individual cannot cut her/himself off easily from the norms and categories that structure her/his relationship with the world.