Exaggerated hearing loss appears as an overly conservative response bias during audiometry

Evidence

Listeners can adopt both conservative and liberal criteria during an audiometric evaluation, and an audiologist or experimenter should be aware of the consequences of adopting these nonneutral criteria on the threshold estimate. In one extreme case, listeners exaggerating their hearing loss are overly conservative in their responses. The listener with a conservative bias has a decreased tendency to say, … “Yes I heard something,” and only responds to signals presented at relatively high sensory levels. — Jennifer Lentz, Psychoacoustics- Perception of Normal…, 342