The Marlowe-Crowne Social Desirability Scale, a measure of defensiveness, is related to various psychotherapeutic process and outcome variables. The present study tested the hypothesis that lower intellectual ability and educational achievement are associated with defensiveness. In a sample of 50 patients in psychotherapy, defensiveness was not significantly correlated with WAIS—R IQs estimated from Shipley-Hartford scores and only weakly related (−.26) to education. It appears that patients' defensiveness is relatively unassociated with these objective indices of ability and achievement.
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