| This dissertation attempts to refine and extend Baumeister's (1998) pathbreaking research on "ego depletion." According to Baumeister, people have limited cognitive resources available for problem solving and decision making. After performing a difficult cognitive task, people exhibit impairment on a subsequent unrelated cognitive task. Baumeister suggests that the first task uses up cognitive resources and leaves insufficient resources for performing the second task.; The main objective of the dissertation is to identify the conditions under which ego depletion effects are observed in consumer choice and to investigate an alternative explanation to the phenomenon of deterioration of cognitive performance observed by Baumeister et al. (1998). This dissertation focuses on investigating the motivational process that mediates the effect of cognitive task difficulty on consumer decision making when performing a subsequent information processing task. Unlike Baumeister et al. (1998), who attributed the observed deterioration of cognitive performance after solving a difficult task to depletion of self-regulatory resources, it is suggested that observed increases in the magnitude of the direction of comparison effect and decreased cognitive performance are caused by consumer motivation to exert less effort when solving subsequent problems. Research has shown that the need for cognitive closure (NCC) is increased due to aversive and effortful processing that raises the costs of nonclosure, and that individuals tend to reduce their level of information processing as a result (Kruglanski, 1989, 1990b; Webster, Richter, & Kruglanski, 1996, Mayseless & Kruglanski, 1987).; Three experiments are designed to assess the impact of choice difficulty on the level of intellectual performance on a subsequent cognitive task, and to assess the role of situationally induced need for nonspecific cognitive closure as a mediator. The first experiment investigates how the alignability/nonalignabilty as well as positive/negative valence of the product attributes affects the number of correctly solved solvable anagrams. The second experiment explores the effect of the alignability on the subsequent persistence when attempting to solve unsolvable anagrams. Finally, the third experiment is designed to demonstrate that the effect of task difficulty, operationally defined as attribute conflict on the number of correctly solved anagrams and magnitude of direction-of-comparison effect, is moderated by time pressure. The data supports the hypothesis that the need for cognitive closure mediates the effect of initial task difficulty on subsequent cognitive performance deterioration. |
