need for closure

n. The need for closure is the desire for immediate and definite knowledge and the aversion toward the uncertainties associated with ambiguity.

The need for closure construct originates from lay epistemic theory, which has been developed by Arie Kruglanski to describe and highlight the role of motivation in everyday cognitive processes. The theory explains everyday cognition as a form of naïve science. Similarly to scientists, laypeople construe their judgments and beliefs by observing, by using these observations to generate hypotheses, and then by validating these hypotheses through matching with available evidence. As a result of these processes of hypothesis generation and hypothesis validation, a particular stimulus environment becomes disambiguated, thus affording judgment and action.

The process of disambiguation often requires considerable mental resources. As a consequence, motivation may play a role in when and how people will engage in the processing of particular stimulus information. The construct of need for closure is used to describe the motivational components of the cognitive process. Within the framework of lay epistemic theory, a distinction is made between specific and nonspecific closure motivation. Both of these types of closure are assumed to vary along a continuum with a strong need to attain closure on the one end versus a strong need to avoid closure on the other end of the continuum. The need for specific closure is used to describe the cognitive motivation of an individual who aims to obtain specific, desirable knowledge.

This need for desirable knowledge may culminate in a biased search for information, favoring particular information over other information. The need for nonspecific closure refers to the tendency of an individual to obtain certainty by accepting any information, as opposed to remaining in a state of uncertainty and ambiguity. This tendency of nonspecific closure has been associated with quick adoption of particular beliefs or knowledge elements, a tendency referred to as “seizing,” and a tendency to hang on to these beliefs fervently, referred to as “freezing.” In the psychological literature, the need for closure has often been equated with the need for nonspecific closure.

The need for nonspecific closure may be elicited by a variety of factors. These factors pertain to the extent to which reaching closure is perceived to have greater benefits than avoiding closure. Reaching closure can be considered particularly beneficial when immediate action needs to be initiated or predictability is sought. Working under time pressure may thus be a particularly powerful instigator of the need for closure. Similarly, the need for closure may be enhanced when individuals perform particular tasks in particularly unpleasant environments. Moreover, being confronted with an informational overload, or being mentally fatigued and thus deprived of the resources to cope with incoming information, may induce the need for closure because reaching closure gratifies the situationally induced desire for predictability. Factors such as time pressure and mental fatigue that contribute to the need for closure have all been used in experimental settings to study the phenomenon.

The need for closure also varies across individuals. Research testing the psychometric properties of the need for cognitive closure scale has demonstrated stable personality differences in five subcomponents of the need for closure: a preference for order and structure, an emotional discomfort associated with ambiguity, an impatience and impulsivity with regard to decision making, a desire for security and predictability, and closed-mindedness. Finally, the need for cognitive closure has been shown to vary across cultures. Some cultures may value order and predictability to a greater extent than others.

Whether situationally induced, measured by means of a personality questionnaire, or studied by means of cross-cultural comparison, the need for closure has been shown to encompass a variety of implications for intrapersonal and interpersonal components of cognition. Research has shown that time pressure induces the seizing and freezing tendencies referred to earlier, producing pronounced primacy effects in impression formation and the tendency to base judgments on prevalent stereotypes and to assimilate numerical estimates to anchor values. Another line of research has shown that heightened need for closure increases the tendency to accept accessible attributions. Several studies have attempted to separate the seizing from the freezing tendency, both of which were assumed to emanate from a high need for closure. Consistently with need for closure theory, before participants were able to form a crystallized opinion, increased need for closure led to seizing expressed in the tendency to be quickly persuaded by an interaction partner. After participants crystallized an opinion, however, a heightened need for closure led to freezing expressed in a resistance to be persuaded.

In the domain of interpersonal perception, the need for closure has been linked to a decreased ability to take the perspective of an interaction partner, once the person “freezes” on his or her own perspective. This tendency has also been shown to affect the negotiation strategies of high versus low need for closure individuals. It has been found that individuals with high (vs. low) dispositional need for closure tend more to adhere to anchor values (alleged profits attained by others) in defining the minimal profits they themselves would accept, to make smaller concessions to their negotiation partners, to engage in less systematic information processing, and to base their negotiation behavior more on stereotyped perceptions of their opponents. Need for closure has also been associated with language use, particularly with regard to abstractness. Abstract language indicates a permanence of judgments across situations and hence a greater stability of closure. Consistently with the basis of lay epistemic theory, research supports the notion that people who have high need for closure use more abstract terms in their communications.

On a group level, higher need for closure has been related to a variety of features of group dynamics that are especially conducive to creating and maintaining a consensually shared reality. Research has identified a number of these features, including pressures to opinion uniformity among group members, endorsement of an autocratic leadership and decision-making structure, intolerance of diversity in group composition, rejection of opinion deviates and extolment of conformists, in-group favoritism and out-group derogation, attraction to groups possessing strongly shared realities, conservatism and adherence to the group’s norms, loyalty to one's in-group qualified by the degree to which it constitutes a “good” shared reality provider.

Generally, research on the need for closure continues to expand across domains of social psychology and across labs throughout the world. Taken together, lay epistemic theory and the construct of need for closure have demonstrated the fertility of jointly considering motivational and cognitive processes and of taking into account the full application potential of the motivated cognition movement in social psychology. – MD, AK