Need for Closure and Cognitive Inhibition of Unwanted or Irrelevant Information

AbstractNeed for closure is a construct that influences the way people perceive social world. Need for closure reflects a preference towards certainty and stability, clarity and firm rules, definitive answers to questions, and an aversion to ambiguity and lack of control. People with high scores at the need of closure dimension of personality are prone to adopt stereotypical judgments and less inclined to accept diversity. This construct also correlates with the tendency to follow rules, to perseverate in old beliefs and to accept routines. Cognitive inhibition is a mechanism that ensures the continuous updating of information in memory. The general aim of this paper was to investigate a possible relation between the need of closure and people's ability to inhibit unwanted information from memory, with a particular focus on stereotypical information. Cognitive inhibition has been investigated through the directed-forgetting paradigm and the need of closure dimension has been assessed with the Need of Closure Scale (NCS, Kruglanski et al., 2013). The results illustrate the difficulties to voluntary forget stereotypical information for all the participants included in the study group