The influence of cognitive complexity and task goal on processing inconsistent information about a person

The present investigation sought to integrate current theoretical approaches to impression formation and inconsistency resolution in the context of a systematic attempt to further explore the conditions under which subjects adopt more effortful, elaborative processes in thinking about a target person. The joint effects of two factors which individually have been shown to influence the information processing strategies of social perceivers were investigated: task goal and individual differences in cognitive complexity.

Two hundred subjects were presented with three blocks of information about a target person. Half of the subjects received favorable information first, with the remaining subjects receiving unfavorable information first. After performing a short distractor task, subjects were asked to recall the information units, make a series of personality judgments about the target, and write a narrative impression about him. As predicted, judgment and impression primacy effects were found for impression-set subjects and recency effects for comprehension-set subjects. These effects occurred on both evaluative (favorable-unfavorable) and Big Five factor trait judgment dimensions.

The cognitive complexity (CC) measure was found to predict order effects on certain trait judgments, while the the Need for Cognition Scale (NC) predicted order effects on evaluative judgment. Subjects scoring low on the CC measure (LCCs) were found to show recency in their trait judgments, regardless of task goal, and to produce trait judgments which were correlated with the trait implications of the behavioral information they were able to recall. In addition, the NC measure was associated with more elaborated written narrative impressions involving more mentions of and attempts to reconcile the target's inconsistent behavior. Subjects scoring high on the NC also showed more variability across judgment ratings relative to low scoring subjects.