Motivational correlates of need for cognition

Need for cognition is usually characterized as an intrinsic desire to engage in challenging intellectual activity. In achievement situations, however, it could be associated with more extrinsic goals such as success or the avoidance of failure. Three experiments examined this possibility. Participants in all studies were led to believe they would perform either an easy or a difficult intellectual task that they were likely to fail. After inducing this expectation, indices of extrinsic motivation were obtained. Participants with high need for cognition became more motivated to avoid negative consequences of their behavior (e.g., failure) when they expected the task they would perform to be difficult. In contrast, participants with low need for cognition were not appreciably affected by these expectancies. The anticipation of engaging in intellectual activity apparently stimulates different motives in people with high and low need for cognition, and the mindset induced by these motives influences their later behavioral decisions. Copyright# 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. The motivation to engage in demanding cognitive activity can obviously determine the impact of information on attitudes and behavior. A measure of this motivation (Cacioppo & Petty, 1982; Cacioppo, Petty, Feinstein, & Jarvis, 1996), which is typically referred to as need for cognition, has consistently predicted the effort that people expend on tasks that require thought and reasoning, as reflected in the influence of the arguments contained in a persuasive communication (Priester & Petty, 1995) and the use of heuristic bases for judgment (Haugtvedt, Petty, & Cacioppo, 1992). The need for cognition scale has been among the most successful individual difference measures ever developed (for an extensive review of relevant research and theory, see Cacioppo et al., 1996). The motivational roots of need for cognition are nevertheless somewhat ambiguous. Need for cognition is often assumed to reflect an intrinsic desire to engage in challenging cognitive activity. However, the need is multidimensional (Lord & Putrevu, 2006). Moreover, although individuals with high and low need for cognition may differ in their intrinsic motivation to engage in cognitive activity, they may differ in extrinsic motivation as well. The present research investigated the nature of these differences. Extrinsic motives can include both a desire to attain positive outcomes of a behavior or decision (approachmotivation) and a desire to avoid negative consequences (avoidancemotivation). Classical theories of approach/avoidancemotivation (Atkinson, 1964) are refined in a recent model of self-regulation (Förster, Grant, Idson, & Higgins, 2001; Higgins, 1997). According to this formulation, some individuals conceptualize the alternative outcomes of an achievement test as ‘‘success’’ and ‘‘non-success’’ and evaluate them as positive and neutral, respectively. Others interpret the same outcomes as ‘‘non-failure’’ and ‘‘failure’’ and evaluate them as neutral and aversive, respectively. Thus, although both types of individuals might desire to do well on the task, the former individuals are more likely to be motivated by the positive value of success, whereas the latter are more likely to be motivated by aversion to failure. Individual differences in approach or avoidance motivation might be traceable in part to such differences in framing. In short, cognitive activity can often be stimulated by approach and avoidance motives as well as by the intrinsic pleasure of engaging in this activity. Moreover, the motives are not necessarily restricted to achievement situations. European Journal of Social Psychology Eur. J. Soc. Psychol. 39, 608–621 (2009) Published online 26 August 2008 in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com) DOI: 10.1002/ejsp.565 *Correspondence to: Yael Steinhart, Department of Marketing, University of Haifa, Haifa, Israel. E-mail: [email protected] Copyright # 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Received 19 March 2007 Accepted 16 July 2008 Attention to the quality of arguments in a persuasive message, for example, could be motivated in part by the personal satisfaction that comes from effectively refuting the arguments’ implications. Alternatively, it could stem from a desire to avoid being gullible. Thus, individuals with high and low need for cognition may differ in the sheer pleasure they derive from intellectual activity but other motives could operate as well. In this regard, the need for cognition is a presumably a stable motivational disposition that generalizes over situations (Amabile, Hill, Hennessey, & Tighe, 1994; Brett, Bodo, & Stephanie, 2004; Cacioppo & Petty, 1982; Cacioppo et al., 1996). In contrast, approach and avoidance motives are more likely to be situationally dependent (Foxall & Yani-deSoriano, 2005; Pham & Avnet, 2004). For example, differences in the concern with positive or negative behavioral outcomes might be activated by describing the outcomes of a decision as either gains versus non-gains or non-losses versus losses (Lee & Aaker, 2004; Monga & Zhu, 2005). They can also be induced by (a) activating individuals’ concepts of themselves as independent or interdependent (Lee, Aaker, & Gardner, 2000; see also Hamilton & Biehl, 2005), (b) stimulating thoughts about hopes and aspirations as opposed to duties and responsibilities (Liberman, Molden, Idson, & Higgins, 2001), or (c) varying individuals’ awareness of themselves as members of a group (Aaker & Lee, 2001; Briley & Wyer, 2002). Although chronic individual differences in the relative emphasis placed on success and the avoidance of failure can result from differences in social learning (Miller, Wiley, Fung, & Liang, 1997), they are often not apparent unless situational factors activate the values that underlie them (Briley, Morris, & Simonson, 2000, 2005). The relative emphasis placed on positive versus negative consequences of a behavioral outcome could reflect a more generalmindset that once activated, influences behavior and decisions in not only the situation that gives rise to it but other, ostensibly unrelated situations. In Briley and Wyer’s (2002) research, for example, increasing participants’ awareness of their membership in a group stimulated them to prefer products that had the least undesirable features despite the fact that these products also had the least desirable ones. It also led them to allocate resources to themselves and another that were likely to minimize the negative affect that resulted from these allocations, and to endorse proverbs that emphasized the desirability of compromise. Finally, it led participants to choose candies of different types rather than of the same type as a reward for participating in the experiment (thereby minimizing the risk of making a ‘‘wrong’’ choice). If the relative emphasis placed on positive and negative decision consequences reflects the activation of a mindset, it can have diagnostic value. Suppose an individual works especially hard to solve an intellectual problem. This behavior could be attributed to a desire to succeed (approach motivation), a desire to avoid failure (avoidance motivation) or both. If these motives give rise to different mindsets (Briley & Wyer, 2002), however, their influence on an individual’s efforts to solve the problem might be inferred from his or her behavior in subsequent situations in which the two motives have different implications. This behavior could include both behavioral decisions that require a tradeoff between the acquisition of positive outcomes and the receipt of negative ones (Briley et al., 2000, 2005; Briley & Wyer, 2002) and responses to questionnaire measures of the relative emphasis placed on these outcomes (Higgins, Idson, Freitas, Spiegel, & Moldan, 2003; Lockwood, Jordon, & Kunda, 2002; Sengupta & Zhou, 2007). An avoidance-focused mindset and a success-focused mindset are presumably represented in memory as motivationbased concepts and procedures and may coexist in memory. To this extent, their activation and use in any given instance may depend on both situational and chronic individual difference factors that influence their relative accessibility in memory (Higgins, 1996; Wyer, 2008). The likelihood of failure, for example, is greater when a task is difficult but success on such a task is more rewarding. Therefore, an avoidance-focused mindset and a success-focused mindset could both be activated by the anticipation of performing such a task. Thus, if individuals with high need for cognition are more motivated to engage in effortful cognitive activity than individuals with low need for cognition (Brett et al., 2004; Cacioppo & Petty, 1982), it could reflect the operation of either of these mindsets. However, which disposition predominates may be reflected in responses in other situations that reflect the disposition in question. Three experiments examined these possibilities. The first two studies demonstrated that leading high need for cognition individuals to anticipate performing a task on which they were likely to fail increases their motivation to avoid negative consequences of their behavior as reflected in two different questionnaire measures of this motivation (Higgins, Roney, Crowe, & Hymes, 1994; Lockwood et al., 2002). In contrast, the motivational orientation of low need for cognition individuals is unaffected. The third experiment showed that once these motivational orientations are activated, they influence behavioral decisions in unrelated tasks that participants perform subsequently. When the choice alternatives are unfamiliar, variety seeking can sometimes reflect a desire for novelty and a willingness to take a risk. When the alternatives are familiar, however, it is more likely to reflect an unwillingness to forego one attractive alternative for another option that is also desirable. Copyright # 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Eur. J. Soc. Psychol. 39, 608–621 (2009) DOI: 10.1002/ejsp Motivational correlates of need for cognition 609