INDIVIDUAL AND SITUATIONAL DIFFERENCES IN DESIRE FOR CERTAINTY.

The article provides information on two studies which investigated the consistency of individual differences in strength of desire for certainty, and to see if this desire could be situationally increased or decreased by experimental procedures. In the first study, the correlation was determined between subjects' extremity of response to several attitude and judgment instruments and their scores on a test of desire for certainty. The second study compared two groups on strength of desire for certainty, using the same test as the first study, following the exposure of one group to a series of difficult Gottschaldt hidden figures, and the other to an easy group.