Social desirability bias (SDB) is one of the main concerns in self-reported studies that measures explicit attitudes such as ethics research. Although SDB was introduced since the early 1950s, little effort has been made to understand the necessity of including an SDB scale in studies of sensitive topics such as ethics. The purpose of this paper was to (1) identify whether current ethics-related studies considered SDB when conducting their research and (2) ascertain whether SDB was a significant variable in such studies. This investigation takes the form of a systematic review of articles published within the last 20 years in well-known business ethics journals (2000–2019). We found that (a) only 13.67% of ethics research measured SDB; (b) although the majority of the reviewed articles were from the West, researchers in Asia have also made significant progress in recent years in measuring SDB in their studies; (c) SDB was used mainly as a control variable and as such researchers preferred scales with fewer items; and (d) SDB was unavoidable even when using online surveys. Based on our findings, we attempt to provide an overview of SDB in ethics research and encourage ethics researchers who adopt self-reported surveys to include an SDB measurement in their studies to control SDB.

社会期望偏差 (SDB) 是自我报告研究中的主要问题之一，该研究衡量道德研究等明确态度。尽管自 1950 年代初就引入了 SDB，但很少有人努力理解将 SDB 量表纳入伦理等敏感话题的研究的必要性。本文的目的是 (1) 确定当前的伦理相关研究在进行研究时是否考虑了 SDB，以及 (2) 确定 SDB 是否是此类研究中的一个重要变量。本次调查采用对过去 20 年间在著名商业道德期刊（2000-2019 年）上发表的文章进行系统审查的形式。我们发现 (a) 只有 13.67% 的伦理研究测量了 SDB；(b) 尽管大部分评论文章来自西方，近年来，亚洲的研究人员在研究中衡量 SDB 方面也取得了重大进展；(c) SDB 主要用作控制变量，因此研究人员更喜欢项目较少的量表；(d) 即使使用在线调查，SDB 也是不可避免的。根据我们的发现，我们试图概述道德研究中的 SDB，并鼓励采用自我报告调查的道德研究人员在他们的研究中包括 SDB 测量以控制 SDB。