Need for cognition

In Studies 1 and 2, we administered the Need for Cognition Scale (NFCS; Cacioppo & Petty, 1982) to explore whether individual differences in engaging in thoughtful activity were related to resource mobilization. At the end of the experiments, immediately before debriefing, participants completed a French version (Ginet & Py, 2000) of the NFCS (Cacioppo & Petty, 1982; Cacioppo, Petty, &

Kao, 1984). They rated each item on a 7-point scale, ranging from totally disagree (1) to totally agree (7).

Since the results were inconclusive, we decided not to report them in the manuscripts submitted for publication. However, in the body of this thesis, this is an aspect that deserves some attention and discussion.

The MBM considers that an individual’s processing style – or extent of engagement in information processing – is an effect rather than a determinant of informational mood impact (Gendolla et al., 2007). By contrast, other approaches consider that moods have determinant and stable effects on cognitive processing. Accordingly, these theories argue that, when people are in a negative mood they exert more complex, demanding, systematic, and local processing strategies; conversely, when in a positive mood, people are more likely to rely on heuristic, easy, and global processing strategies (e.g., Fiedler, 1991; Forgas, 1995a; Gaspar & Clore, 2002). The preference to engage in thoughtful activity has been studied through research focusing on the need for cognition – NFC (A. R. Cohen, Stotland, & Wolfe, 1955; Cacioppo & Petty, 1982; Cacioppo, Petty, & Kao, 1984). It has been considered that “individuals

high in need for cognition naturally tend to seek, acquire, think about, and reflect back on information to make sense of stimuli, relationships, and events in their world; individuals low in need for cognition, in contrast, are more likely to rely on others (e.g., experts), cognitive heuristics, or social comparisons to provide this structure” (Cacioppo, Petty, Feinstein, & Jarvis, 1996, p. 243). Other characteristics attributed to these two groups is that high-NFC individuals enjoy cognitive activities even in the absence of external reward or performance feedback, prefer complex to simple tasks, and exhibit a stronger propensity to search for new information (see Enge, Fleischhauer, Brocke & Strobel, 2008 for review).

Therefore, it is not surprising that NFC is positively correlated with recall and recognition (e.g., Kardash

& Noel, 2000; Lassiter, Briggs & Slaw, 1991; Peltier & Schibrowsky, 1994), and also positively related to academic performance and course grades (e.g., Coutinho, Wiemer-Hastings, Skowronski & Britt, 2005;

Gülgöz, 2001; Leon & Dalton, 1988; Sadowski & Gülgöz, 1996).

In study 1, according to the diverse evidence mentioned above, one exploratory consideration could be that high-NFC people would memorize more items and more correctly, since they would see the presented image as a potential challenge. Probably a relation between SBP and NFC could also be found. The results did not correspond to these possible expectations: no correlations were found between NFC and memory or between SBP and NFC. The only interesting effect was a marginally significant interaction between memorizing instructions and NFC. This means that high-NFC people mobilized more effort when facing an explicitly demanding task, whereas in the absence of explicit instructions to perform a task, low-NFC subjects mobilized more effort. These results must be viewed with caution due to the small sample used.

In study 2, most participants showed a tendency to engage in thoughtful activity (high-NFC people; Cacioppo & Petty, 1982). This result can be due to the composition of our sample, comprised of university students only, since it is expected that people at university are more engaged in cognitive activity. Social desirability could also play a role: even when it is said that the answers are anonymous, there could be a belief that the evaluator will know. Nevertheless, there were no main effects of this variable. In accordance with the “need for cognition” reasoning, it could be expected that when confronted with an objective demand (memorize a series of letters), high-NFC participants would expend more effort, since they are more interested in the stimuli than low-NFC participants. However, in this study, NFC cannot explain the pattern of effort: the results, especially the SBP interactions, were not coherent enough to draw a conclusion. Additionally, one might expect high-NFC participants to allocate more effort during task performance, given that in another of Cacioppo and collaborators’

experiment (Cacioppo, Petty & Morris, 1983) high-NFC individuals reported investing more cognitive

effort and recalled more message arguments. The similarity in effort allocation could be expected, even if we were not dealing with arguments, but with nonsense letter strings. Nevertheless, such similarity was not found. It was not even the case that NFC had an influence on the number or the accuracy of the letter series recalled by participants.

In sum, contrary to other studies (e.g., Kardash & Noel, 2000; Lassiter et al. 1991; Peltier &

Schibrowsky, 1994), we did not find a correlation between NFC and recall or between NFC and cognitive effort (measured as SBP reactivity). It could be argued that a memory task is not stimulating enough for high-NFC persons, resulting in no effects of the NFC in our studies. In addition, most of the NFC validation studies used more elaborated cognitive tasks, involving decision making.

The findings of our studies regarding the NFC seem to point in the direction that the processing style is an effect rather than a determinant of informational mood impact (Gendolla et al., 2006) and consequently mood has not a stable impact on behavior.