Need for Cognition Scale (short form)

Cacioppo, J. T., Petty, R. E., & Kao, C. F. (1984). The efficient assessment of need for cognition. Journal of Personality Assessment, 48, 306–307.

For each statement below, indicate how well it describes you as follows:

2 = extremely characteristic

1 = somewhat characteristic

0 = uncertain

-1 = somewhat uncharacteristic

-2 = extremely uncharacteristic

1. I would prefer complex to simple problems.
2. I like to have the responsibility of handling a situation that requires a lot of thinking.
3. Thinking is not my idea of fun.
4. I would rather do something that requires little thought than something that is sure to challenge my thinking abilities.
5. I try to anticipate and avoid situations where there is likely a chance I will have to think in depth about something.
6. I find satisfaction in deliberating hard and for long hours.
7. I only think as hard as I have to.
8. I prefer to think about small, daily projects to long-term ones.
9. I like tasks that require little thought once I’ve learned them.
10. The idea of relying on thought to make my way to the top appeals to me.
11. I really enjoy a task that involves coming up with new solutions to problems.
12. Learning new ways to think doesn’t excite me very much.
13. I prefer my life to be filled with puzzles that I must solve.
14. The notion of thinking abstractly is appealing to me.
15. I would prefer a task that is intellectual, difficult, and important to one that is somewhat important but does not require much thought.
16. I feel relief rather than satisfaction after completing a task that required a lot of mental effort.
17. It’s enough for me that something gets the job done; I don’t care how or why it works.
18. I usually end up deliberating about issues even when they do not affect me personally.

Scoring

Items 3, 4, 5, 7, 8, 9, 12, 16, and 17 are reverse scored.

Need for Affect Questionnaire (Maio & Estes, 2001)

Items 1, 2, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 14, 16, 21, 22, 23, 25 are reverse scored

1. You work for a company that sells used college textbooks through a web site. You have decided to conduct a survey to understand what drives student decisions to buy a new text, buy a used text, rent a book, or simply not get the text for a class. The purpose of the survey is to better understand the target audience for the web site. To obtain participants, you post flyers on college campuses and also advertise on several web sites that cater to college students. Students are given an e-mail address they can write to in order to participate in the survey. They are then sent a personalized link to the survey. Upon completion of the survey, they are sent a coupon code for $10 off a used book purchased through the site.
2. You work for a software company that has developed a very popular on-line game. Unfortunately, you’ve noticed one negative side of the game. There is a chat feature in the game, and the chat conversations involve a high level of obscene and offensive language, including racist, sexist, and homophobic slurs. Some users have complained about this, and it potentially could harm the reputation of the company. Based on social psychology, the company wonders whether having a player challenge offensive language will reduce how often it occurs. To try this out, they have proposed having researchers pose as players in the game. When offensive language is detected, the researcher would post a message challenging the problematic language, e.g., “That comment bothers me” or “that’s not the kind of thing we say in this community.” The researchers would then compare the amount of offensive language following such challenging to control situations where no challenging is done.
3. You do UX research for a mid-sized e-commerce company. The company is developing a system to address the issue of users getting frustrated when they have been on the site for a while and can’t accomplish what they set out to do. The system would use an AI algorithm to try to detect when a user is becoming frustrated, and display a dialogue with a message like, “It looks like you might be having a hard time. Is there something we can do to help?” The user is then presented with an option to have an on-line chat with a customer service representative. However, before putting the effort into developing the AI component of the system, the company wants to know how often frustrated users would actually take advantage of the chat option. To do this, they have asked you to take a portion of users and intentionally cause a frustrating experience by causing pages to load slowly, displaying annoying error messages, etc., after which the user will be presented with the chat option.
4. You are doing UX research for a company that offers on-line discount hotel reservations. Their profit margin is extremely slim, so they would like to increase the rates they offer so they can be more profitable. However, they are worried that higher prices will drive away customers. The company has heard that flattery can be an effective tool to get customers to pay more, and they are considering using this approach on their own web site. They want you to do some A/B testing comparing two versions of the site. One version would operate as usual. The other would display a message like “You just found a great low rate!” In addition, for each version of the site, half the customers would see the usual rate, while the other half would see a rate that had been increased by $5 a night, to see if the flattering messages will actually get customers to pay more.