Motivation and cognitive capacity are key factors in people’s everyday struggle withuncertainty. However, the exact nature of their interplay in various contexts still needsto be revealed. The presented paper reports on two experimental studies whichaimed to examine the joint consequences of motivational and cognitive factors forpreferences regarding incomplete information expansion. In Study 1 we demonstratethe interactional effect of motivation and cognitive capacity on information preference.High need for closure resulted in a stronger relative preference for expectancy-inconsistent information among non-depleted individuals, but the opposite amongcognitively depleted ones. This effect was explained by the different informative valueof questions in comparison to affirmative sentences and the potential possibility ofassimilation of new information if it contradicts prior knowledge. In Study 2 we furtherinvestigated the obtained effect, showing that not only questions but also other kindsof incomplete information are subject to the same dependency. Our results support theexpectation that, in face of incomplete information, motivation toward closure may befulfilled efficiently by focusing on expectancy-inconsistent pieces of data. We discussthe obtained effect in the context of previous assumptions that high need for closureresults in a simple processing style, advocating a more complex approach based on thecharacter of the provided information.
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