Self-report measure

Need for Cognition

Need for Cognition uses 10 International Personality Item Pool statements to assess Need for Cognition.

You learn how much you seek out and enjoy hard thinking.

For anyone who loves puzzling over problems and wonders how much they enjoy thinking.

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Report and PDF $4, paid after you finish.

Your answers stay private.

It comes from social psychology research on the enjoyment of effortful thought.

Sample result, example data. Illustrative chart with invented scores; it does not describe any real respondent.

What this test is

Welcome. Need for Cognition uses 10 International Personality Item Pool statements to assess Need for Cognition.

The measure

It has 10 items, each answered on a 5-point (Very Inaccurate … Very Accurate) scale.

International Personality Item Pool (ipip.ori.org). Source scale: Cacioppo & Petty, 1982.

At a glance

Items

Response scale

5-point (Very Inaccurate … Very Accurate)

Est. time

~1 min

Access

Free to take · Full report and PDF for $4, or $2 to repeat

What it measures

Ten statements describe the enjoyment of thinking: preferring complex to simple problems, liking situations that require a lot of thought, finding satisfaction in deliberating hard and for long hours, and enjoying the task of coming up with new solutions. Statements worded the other way describe thinking only as hard as one has to.

Cacioppo and Petty (1982) introduced the need for cognition as a stable tendency to engage in and enjoy effortful thought, and showed that it influences how people process persuasive messages: those high in the need attend to the quality of arguments, while those low in it rely more on simple cues. The statements here come from the public-domain International Personality Item Pool (IPIP).

The ratings are combined into a single score. Higher scores describe a stronger enjoyment of effortful thinking; lower scores describe a preference for conserving mental effort. The scale measures motivation, not intelligence.

The scale is used in research on persuasion, decision-making and learning. On this site, the Big Five Aspect Scales (BFAS) include Intellect, a related aspect of personality, the Sixteen Primary-Factor Scales include Reasoning and Abstractedness, and the Workplace Personality Profile includes a Learning Approach style.

Validity evidence

Need for Cognition shows good convergent validity with intellectual curiosity and openness to experience, predicts academic achievement and systematic information processing, and discriminates from social desirability (Cacioppo & Petty, 1982).

Example item

“Like to solve complex problems.”

Very InaccurateModerately InaccurateNeither Accurate nor InaccurateModerately AccurateVery Accurate

Illustrative only. During administration items are presented one screen-set at a time; response-key direction is never shown to respondents.

Scoring & interpretation

Your report explains each of your scale scores in plain language.

References

Cacioppo, J. T., & Petty, R. E. (1982). The need for cognition. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 42(1), 116-131.
Goldberg, L. R. (1999). A broad-bandwidth, public domain, personality inventory. Personality Psychology in Europe, 7, 7-28.

Sample report preview

The report shows your total score and where it falls across the range of possible scores, followed by a plain-language explanation of what scores in that region describe. Where the instrument has published interpretive bands, the report names the band and what it means. It closes with notes on how to read the result and on when a conversation with a qualified professional may be useful.

Report contents
Section	What it shows
Score	Your scale score, computed with the published scoring key.
Comparisons	How your scores compare with a published comparison group.

It is free to take, and the full report with a downloadable copy is $4.

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