For the “Overthinkers” Out There: Could You Actually Have A High ‘Need for Cognition’?
Some of us get more satisfaction from the act of thinking deeply.
Everyone knows that 3-year-olds ask endless questions. But for some of us, that desire to learn more, more, more doesn’t end as we get older.
It persists — this core need for information that, when satisfied, generates a feeling of internal ease.
But that flip side is a killer. When we feel that some important part of the world is vague or doesn’t quite make sense — when we can’t fit all the puzzle pieces together into a unified picture — we feel bothered. Restless. Unsettled.
Turns out there is a name for this way of going through the world: having a high “need for cognition.” And understanding it can help us make sense of our own reactions.
But also, read to the end — because maybe need for cognition only explains part of the story. How’s that for a teaser?
(You can get a sense for your own need for cognition here.)
How I got here
It feels a little funny to write about this, because I only learned the term “need for cognition” when trying to resolve a feeling of ambiguity around my own need for cognition. It’s… a little meta.
Here’s what happened. Yesterday, I had a phone call with a family member. I called her because I found myself thinking about our childhood, and about one person close to both of us whose mind and motivations I have always struggled to understand. There’s a part of me that grieves the lack of depth in my relationship with that person — and because I don’t have a ton of memories from my childhood, I was hoping the family member could lend me some of her memories.
I asked said family member a handful of questions about her recollections of the person in question. As she reflected her memories back to me, a few of those missing puzzle pieces fit into place, and I found myself crying. In hindsight, I can see that they weren’t quite tears of grief. They were tears of clarity — the tears of someone who finally understood something hard and big and important.
(Side note: if you’re on a city hike in Oakland and see a mid-30s woman crying on the phone as she walks quickly down the trail, there’s a decent chance it’s me doing an emotional walk-and-talk.)
Then, as our conversation started wrapping up, my family member encouraged me to consider a different approach — one in which I spent less time trying to understand this person. She encouraged me to move in the direction of forgiveness — to accept the person as they are, release their hold on my emotions, “let go of the anger.”
The experience was a little jarring. I felt like I wasn’t being understood, but I had a hard time explaining why. After all, she was right in identifying some of the emotions at play. Part of me is angry — and sad, for that matter, and a bunch of other things that don’t feel great.
But I really don’t feel like the anger or sadness are what cause my persistent unease—not when I think of this person from my childhood, and not in general. I have all sorts of feelings, all the time, that ebb and flow through me. They hit me acutely and then subside. I’m emotional, and I love that I’m that way — but my harder emotions don’t tend to linger for long. When they do, they DO, and I am compelled to change things up so that I can recover homeostasis.
Rather, I’m pretty sure that what leaves me feeling most off in my day-to-day life is my lack of clarity around things that matter to me. In this case, it was a lack of clarity around how a certain person’s mind works and why we relate to each other the way we do.
I feel this deep desire to understand — to, as the gents who initially described certain people’s high need for cognition in the 1950s put it, “organize [my] experience meaningfully,” “structure relevant situations in meaningful, integrated ways”, and “understand and make reasonable the experiential world” (p. 291).
I tried to explain this to my family member—but since I hadn’t learned about the “need for cognition” concept yet, I got a little tongue-tied.
And THAT is where things get a little meta. As the day went on, I kept coming back to the idea that I feel compelled to more fully understand certain things, but that I couldn’t explain the compulsion itself, even to someone who knows me quite well.
So, per usual, I took to Google and, with a bit of sleuthing, figured out a helpful psychological term. With that, my need for cognition — my desire to “understand and make reasonable the experiential world” — was met. And it felt good.
Let’s throw a wrench in things
But of course, in true “need for cognition” form, it’s always more complicated than that!
As I was writing this piece, I filled out a standard battery of research questions that scientists use to measure people’s need for cognition. I got a high score — but the questions didn’t quite match up with the conception of “need for cognition” that I laid out above. They seemed more about a preference or tendency to think in complex ways about everything.
And while that does explain part of my information-gathering, deep-thinking tendencies, I definitely feel more compelled to engage in complex thinking on matters that are both personal and unresolved. And after thoroughly exploring a topic, I get a lot of satisfaction from reaching a conclusion.
Many psychologists would describe that tendency not as a need for cognition but, rather, as a need for closure. You can think of a high need for closure as a low tolerance for ambiguity, which can create a strong internal desire to get any answer to a lingering question, any resolution to an uncertain situation.
(You can take a quiz on your need for closure here.)
My (current) take
I score quite high on both “need for cognition” and “need for closure” measures. And that makes sense to me. They are both important parts of my mind, and they both play integral roles in the way I seek out and process information.
My need for closure makes me crave answers; my need for cognition spurs an answer-generating process that is thorough and nuanced. My need for closure provides the drive; my need for cognition provides the enjoyment of the information-seeking process. My low tolerance for ambiguity raises a red flag when a previously reached conclusion still feels a little off — when I sense that my latest puzzle piece actually only “fits” because I applied some force to it. My high need for cognition happily takes me back to the drawing board.
Do you have high need for cognition? What about need for closure? How does that shape how you go through the world? Let me know in the comments — I’m always eager to learn more from other people’s experiences. (But, I mean, would you expect anything less from a high-need-for-cognition-and-closure person?)
