Personality Disorders: Theory, Research, and Treatment, Vol 17(4), Jul 2026, 231-242; doi:10.1037/per0000761
The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders’ (5th ed.; DSM-5) official self-report instrument to assess personality disorders is the Personality Inventory for DSM-5 (PID-5). To screen for response bias, three validity scales have been constructed from the PID-5 item pool to assess, respectively, inconsistency, overreporting, and underreporting. Nonetheless, the prevalence and impact of PID-5 response bias on diverse psychometric properties are largely underdocumented. Thus, this study aims at: (a) identifying the rates of positive screening of each validity scale, (b) identifying the degree of overlap between validity scales, and (c) documenting the impact of each bias on scale scores, criterion validity (correlations with self- and informant-assessed personality pathology), and internal consistency. Preregistered analyses were conducted among a large population-representative sample (n = 2,505, 51.2% females) and an at-risk sample of young adults (n = 321, 48.3% females). For each sample, respectively, plausible estimates were obtained for inconsistency (4.7% and 7.2%) and overreporting (2.9% and 5.6%), whereas the underreporting scale likely led to an overestimation of the prevalence (38.6% and 32.4%). Screening positive on two PID-5 validity scales was rare (