What the Need for Closure Scale measures and what it does not: Toward differentiating among related epistemic motives.

Neuberg, Steven L.; Judice, T. Nicole; West, Stephen G.

doi:10.1037/0022-3514.72.6.1396

Cited by 238 publications

(249 citation statements)

References 62 publications

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“…The need to manage uncertainty, therefore, has been identified as a critical motive that determines behavior (Hogg, 2007;Kruglanski & Webster, 1996;Neuberg, Judice, & West, 1997;van den Bos, 2009). How do people react, then, when they find themselves unfamiliar or unknowledgeable about a specific domain?…”

Section: The Prevalence and Consequences Of Unfamiliarity Surroundingmentioning

confidence: 99%

On the perpetuation of ignorance: System dependence, system justification, and the motivated avoidance of sociopolitical information.

Shepherd¹,

Kay²

2012

Journal of Personality and Social Psychology

130

107

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How do people cope when they feel uninformed or unable to understand important social issues, such as the environment, energy concerns, or the economy? Do they seek out information, or do they simply ignore the threatening issue at hand? One would intuitively expect that a lack of knowledge would motivate an increased, unbiased search for information, thereby facilitating participation and engagement in these issues-especially when they are consequential, pressing, and self-relevant. However, there appears to be a discrepancy between the importance/self-relevance of social issues and people's willingness to engage with and learn about them. Leveraging the literature on system justification theory (Jost & Banaji, 1994), the authors hypothesized that, rather than motivating an increased search for information, a lack of knowledge about a specific sociopolitical issue will (a) foster feelings of dependence on the government, which will (b) increase system justification and government trust, which will (c) increase desires to avoid learning about the relevant issue when information is negative or when information valence is unknown. In other words, the authors suggest that ignorance-as a function of the system justifying tendencies it may activate-may, ironically, breed more ignorance. In the contexts of energy, environmental, and economic issues, the authors present 5 studies that (a) provide evidence for this specific psychological chain (i.e., ignorance about an issue 3 dependence 3 government trust 3 avoidance of information about that issue); (b) shed light on the role of threat and motivation in driving the second and third links in this chain; and (c) illustrate the unfortunate consequences of this process for individual action in those contexts that may need it most.

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Section: The Prevalence and Consequences Of Unfamiliarity Surroundingmentioning

confidence: 99%

On the perpetuation of ignorance: System dependence, system justification, and the motivated avoidance of sociopolitical information.

Shepherd¹,

Kay²

2012

Journal of Personality and Social Psychology

130

107

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

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“…High NFC individuals also experience an urgent desire to reach swift decisions, reflected in their need for decisiveness. Although the NFC scale was developed as a one-dimensional measure of the NFC construct, Neuberg, Judice, and West (1997) proposed a two-factor model for the scale based on psychometric analyses. The first factor, denoting the need for simple structure, comprised items tapping preference for order, preference for predictability, discomfort with ambiguity and closed-mindedness.…”

Section: Cognitive Closure: Separating Ability From Needmentioning

confidence: 99%

Need and Ability to Achieve Closure: Relationships with symptoms of psychopathology

Roets¹,

Soetens²

2010

Personality and Individual Differences

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Recent literature has asserted that excessive choice in everyday life may pose a burden on mental health. The present research further qualifies this claim by focusing on the role of stable individual differences in Need for (cognitive) Closure (NFC) and Ability to Achieve Closure (AAC), which tap into the cognitive-motivational aspects of decision making and choice. The effects of these two distinct components of cognitive closure on mental health and symptoms of psychopathology were investigated in a non-clinical sample (N = 304). Results from regression analyses showed strong opposite effects of NFC (positive) and AAC (negative), which independently predicted scores on the Symptom Checklist-90 and its various facet scales, together explaining up to 29% of the variance. These results attest to the idea that individual differences in the need and ability to achieve cognitive closure play a pivotal role in the potentially detrimental effects of excessive choice on mental health. Moreover, the opposite effects of NFC and AAC clarify the ambivalent findings from previous clinical studies on psychopathology that confounded these two components of cognitive closure and suggest promising directions for clinical research and therapy.

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“…The NFC Scale includes subscales that measure two main aspects of how people acquire and use information. We were concerned with the Decisiveness subscale (see the Appendix), as it is assumed to measure how quickly people are willing to adopt a solution to a problem and is negatively correlated with how long participants search for information in the environment before making a decision (Kruglanski & Webster, 1996;Neuberg, Judice, & West, 1997). As this subscale appears to measure persistence in information search, we predicted that it would show a negative correlation with exit latency: More decisive participants should truncate memory search more quickly.…”

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confidence: 99%

Motivated to retrieve: How often are you willing to go back to the well when the well is dry?

Dougherty¹,

Harbison²

2007

Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cogni

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Despite the necessity of the decision to terminate memory search in many real-world memory tasks, little experimental work has investigated the underlying processes. In this study, the authors investigated termination decisions in free recall by providing participants an open-ended retrieval interval and requiring them to press a stop button when they had finished retrieving. Three variables important to assessing one's willingness to search memory were examined: (a) the time spent searching memory after the last successful retrieval before choosing to quit (the exit latency); (b) task difficulty; and (c) individual differences in motivation, as measured by Webster and Kruglanski's (1994) Need for Closure Scale. A strong negative correlation was found between individual differences in motivation and participants' exit latencies. This negative correlation was present only when the retrieval task started out as relatively difficult.Keywords: recall, memory retrieval, exit latency, stopping rules A fundamental component of memory retrieval is the decision to terminate search. This decision process characterizes many realworld memory retrieval tasks, from the generation of clinical diagnoses by physicians to the recollection of items from a grocery list left at home. Despite the necessity of the decision to terminate memory search in virtually all real-world tasks, little experimental work has investigated the underlying processes.Related to the issue of search termination is the question of what psychological factors affect one's willingness to continue to search memory. Some factors are anticipated by models of memory, such as the use of familiarity in paired-associate retrieval (Diller, Nobel, & Shiffrin, 2001) or feelings of knowing when searching for a question's answer (Barnes, Nelson, Dunlosky, Mazzoni, & Narens, 1999;Costermans, Lories, & Ansay, 1992;Nelson, Gerler, & Narens, 1984;Young, 2004). However, other variables likely are important, too. For example, you presumably would search memory longer for a relatively important task, such as retrieving your grandmother's medications upon admitting her for emergency care. In contrast, search might be truncated relatively quickly for a comparatively unimportant task, such as recollecting movies you recently watched to provide a recommendation for a friend. Variables such as the importance of the retrieval task and idiographic levels of motivation likely serve as important moderators in the process of determining the amount of time one is willing to search memory.In this article, we ask how long people will continue going back to the well (i.e., memory) when the well is dry (i.e., when retrieval has been unsuccessful). In addressing this question, we examined three variables important to assessing one's willingness to search memory: (a) the time spent searching memory after the last successful retrieval before choosing to quit; (b) task difficulty; and (c) individual differences in motivation, as measured by Webster and Kruglanski's (1994) Need for Closure (NFC) ...

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What the Need for Closure Scale measures and what it does not: Toward differentiating among related epistemic motives.

Cited by 238 publications

References 62 publications

On the perpetuation of ignorance: System dependence, system justification, and the motivated avoidance of sociopolitical information.

On the perpetuation of ignorance: System dependence, system justification, and the motivated avoidance of sociopolitical information.

Need and Ability to Achieve Closure: Relationships with symptoms of psychopathology

Motivated to retrieve: How often are you willing to go back to the well when the well is dry?

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