Don’t people exaggerate their “good” traits on personality tests?

To some degree, almost everyone wants to think of themselves in a positive light and most of us want others to think well of us. The scoring formulas we use to measure personality are designed to take this “self-inflating” phenomenon into account. Also, the items (questions) are designed so that not everybody answers the same way--those differences between people give us the information on which to distinguish between people and make predictions about future behavior on the job.