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“When the going gets tough, the tough get going”: Motivation towards closure and effort investment in the performance of cognitive tasks
Previous studies have demonstrated that the need for closure (NFC), which refers to an individual’s aversion toward uncertainty and the desire to quickly reduce it, leads to reluctance to invest effort in judgments and decision making. However, we argue that NFC may lead to either an increase or a d...
Autores principales: | , , |
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Formato: | Online Artículo Texto |
Lenguaje: | English |
Publicado: |
Springer US
2017
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Materias: | |
Acceso en línea: | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5442255/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28603322 http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11031-017-9613-y |
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author | Sankaran, Sindhuja Szumowska, Ewa Kossowska, Małgorzata |
author_facet | Sankaran, Sindhuja Szumowska, Ewa Kossowska, Małgorzata |
author_sort | Sankaran, Sindhuja |
collection | PubMed |
description | Previous studies have demonstrated that the need for closure (NFC), which refers to an individual’s aversion toward uncertainty and the desire to quickly reduce it, leads to reluctance to invest effort in judgments and decision making. However, we argue that NFC may lead to either an increase or a decrease in effort depending on the availability of easy vs. difficult means to achieve closure and perceived importance of the task goal. We found that when closure could be achieved via both less and more demanding means, NFC was associated with decreased effort unless the task was perceived as important (Study 1). However, when attaining closure was possible via demanding means only, NFC was associated with increased effort, regardless of the task importance (Study 2). Moreover, NFC was related to choosing a more instrumental strategy for the goal of closure, even if this strategy required effort (Study 3). The results are discussed in the light of cognitive energetics theory. ELECTRONIC SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL: The online version of this article (doi:10.1007/s11031-017-9613-y) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. |
format | Online Article Text |
id | pubmed-5442255 |
institution | National Center for Biotechnology Information |
language | English |
publishDate | 2017 |
publisher | Springer US |
record_format | MEDLINE/PubMed |
spelling | pubmed-54422552017-06-09 “When the going gets tough, the tough get going”: Motivation towards closure and effort investment in the performance of cognitive tasks Sankaran, Sindhuja Szumowska, Ewa Kossowska, Małgorzata Motiv Emot Original Paper Previous studies have demonstrated that the need for closure (NFC), which refers to an individual’s aversion toward uncertainty and the desire to quickly reduce it, leads to reluctance to invest effort in judgments and decision making. However, we argue that NFC may lead to either an increase or a decrease in effort depending on the availability of easy vs. difficult means to achieve closure and perceived importance of the task goal. We found that when closure could be achieved via both less and more demanding means, NFC was associated with decreased effort unless the task was perceived as important (Study 1). However, when attaining closure was possible via demanding means only, NFC was associated with increased effort, regardless of the task importance (Study 2). Moreover, NFC was related to choosing a more instrumental strategy for the goal of closure, even if this strategy required effort (Study 3). The results are discussed in the light of cognitive energetics theory. ELECTRONIC SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL: The online version of this article (doi:10.1007/s11031-017-9613-y) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. Springer US 2017-04-19 2017 /pmc/articles/PMC5442255/ /pubmed/28603322 http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11031-017-9613-y Text en © The Author(s) 2017 Open AccessThis article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. |
spellingShingle | Original Paper Sankaran, Sindhuja Szumowska, Ewa Kossowska, Małgorzata “When the going gets tough, the tough get going”: Motivation towards closure and effort investment in the performance of cognitive tasks |
title | “When the going gets tough, the tough get going”: Motivation towards closure and effort investment in the performance of cognitive tasks |
title_full | “When the going gets tough, the tough get going”: Motivation towards closure and effort investment in the performance of cognitive tasks |
title_fullStr | “When the going gets tough, the tough get going”: Motivation towards closure and effort investment in the performance of cognitive tasks |
title_full_unstemmed | “When the going gets tough, the tough get going”: Motivation towards closure and effort investment in the performance of cognitive tasks |
title_short | “When the going gets tough, the tough get going”: Motivation towards closure and effort investment in the performance of cognitive tasks |
title_sort | “when the going gets tough, the tough get going”: motivation towards closure and effort investment in the performance of cognitive tasks |
topic | Original Paper |
url | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5442255/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28603322 http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11031-017-9613-y |
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