Do measures of Big 5 personality have a positive bias towards extraverted, conscientious, emotionally stable, ageeable and open individuals? Background:

One free measures of the Big 5 is the IPIP.
I have noticed that IPIP items seem to have a positive bias towards items loading on the extraversion (EX), emotional stability (ES), conscientiousness (C), agreeableness (A), and openness/intellectance (O) pole of the scale.

For example, for agreeableness, you have items "I am interested in people" (positive) and "I insult people" (negative), or for conscientiousness you have items "I pay attention to details" (positive) or "I make a mess of things" (negative).

However, at the level of a construct there are positive aspects to all the other poles of the Big 5. Being disagreeable could mean that you are comfortable confronting people when you believe they have done something wrong or that you are comfortable pointing out social injustice. Being lower on conscientiousness may mean that you don't feel the need to do everything perfectly in life or that you believe that sometimes it's better to be a little messy so that you can focus on more important things.

Questions

Thus, I'm interested in the positive bias in measures of the Big 5 towards conscientiousness, agreeableness, extraversion, emotional stability, and openness.


Is there any research that quantifies the degree to which different measures of the Big 5 display this positive bias?
Are there any Big 5 measures that specifically try to avoid this positive bias?
To what extent is this positive bias inherent to the concepts of the Big 5?
Backstrom et al (2009) have a paper devoted to the question of whether the intercorrelations between the Big 5 scales is due to social desirability bias or substantive factors.
In Study 2 they re-wrote each item on a 100 item IPIP scale so that each item had reduced positive bias. They then administered the original and neutrally worded items to a sample of participants. They found that when IPIP items were worded in a more evaluatively neutral fashion, the correlations between the Big 5 were substantially reduced. Specifically, they state that:


  The first component accounted for 19.3% of the variance in the IPIP
  items as compared with the variance of the first component from the
  analysis of the neutral items of 10.5%. The mean correlation between
  the first principal component and the items was .40 for the IPIP items
  and .12 for the neutral items.


Their first paragraph in the discussion captures several interesting conclusions:


  Taken together, the two studies presented here support a model that
  still appears to be controversial. The model can be described as
  follows: when we use self-ratings for the measurement of personality
  traits, some items tend to activate social desirability concerns. In
  the scores, the participants’ tendency to respond in a socially
  desirable way is mixed with the descriptive aspect of the items, which
  is supposed to measure the FFM. The result is a common factor related
  to all of the other factors in the inventory (Edwards and Edwards,
  1991 and Peabody and Goldberg, 1989). It has been shown several times
  that this factor can be reduced, and that when this is done the items’
  descriptive quality stands out more clearly. In previous studies the
  social desirability of the items has been reduced by simply selecting
  items that correlate weakly with social desirability inventories (e.g.
  Jackson et al., 1996). In the present study, the focus was on the
  semantic content of the items. By systematically making the items from
  the IPIP-100 less attractive, without changing their meaning in any
  crucial way, we could get rid of almost all common variation between
  the factors, i.e. variation related to social desirability. These new
  items appeared to measure the same thing as the original items in the
  IPIP-100, except social desirability. This shows that it is relatively
  easy to create personality inventory items that measure FFM traits
  with less influence of social desirability. We therefore encourage
  inventory constructors to henceforth strive for making inventories
  where descriptive scales are less confounded with social desirability.


References


Bäckström, M., Björklund, F., &amp; Larsson, M. R. (2009). Five-factor inventories have a major general factor related to social desirability which can be reduced by framing items neutrally. Journal of Research in Personality, 43(3), 335-344. PDF