For the past eight years, much has been made of President Bush's tendency to make decisions from his gut. This issue has hit the news again recently, because John McCain's selection of Sarah Palin as a running mate also seems to have come from the gut without careful thought. You would think that for important decisions-like who might be the person who is a heartbeat away from the Presidency-that someone would think about them carefully. So, what is going on here?
Psychologists have developed two related scales that look at individual differences in how much people like to think through choices. Richard Petty and John Cacioppo developed a "Need for Cognition" scale, and Arie Kruglanski developed a "Need for Cognitive Closure" scale. Both of them are relevant here.
Need for Cognition measures how much people like to think about things. People high in Need for Cognition spend a lot of time thinking about things. People low in Need for Cognition tend to act without spending a lot of time thinking.
Need for Cognitive Closure measures how much people want thinking situations to end. So, if you are high in Need for Cognitive Closure, you tend to make decisions very quickly, while if you are low in Need for Cognitive Closure, you tend to avoid making a decision, preferring instead to deliberate about the options.
Why does this matter? The amount of time that someone spends making a choice affects what kind of information that they use to make that choice. Research on these individual differences suggests that people who try to make decisions quickly use easily available aspects of the environment to make a choice. Imagine for example, an advertisement that shows Tiger Woods advertising a watch. The ad might also have information about the watch that tells you something about its function. Someone low in Need for Cognition will be swayed by the celebrity endorsement. Someone high in Need for Cognition will pay more attention to the qualities of the watch.
The interesting thing is that some decisions can be made quite well if they are made quickly. For example, we are often able to make good judgments about a person after a brief exposure to them. If we like them initially, then we will probably continue to like them. Spending a lot of time thinking about whether we might like them is not likely to make our judgment more accurate.
On the other hand, if you are evaluating something where the important characteristics may be hidden, then making a fast judgment is not such a good idea. For example, your ultimate enjoyment of a car comes from aspects that may be hard to take in after only a few minutes. A car that looks great and has a deep throaty roar may still not be that enjoyable if you have trouble driving it in the rain, or if there really isn't enough trunk space. Those qualities are ones that require more thinking to take into account.
Where does the selection of a Vice-President fit in? Well, on the one hand, John McCain was clearly swayed by Sarah Palin's personality-something that can be evaluated quickly. Judging from the crowds flocking to Palin's speeches, he was right about the appeal of her personality as well. In addition, she clearly had stances on issues that fit with a message that McCain wanted to transmit to voters. Whether Palin has the other qualifications needed to be Vice President has yet to be determined. That is where a little more thought beforehand would have been useful.
