The influence of personality on the making of snap decisions and change of mind

The present study is interested in whether personality such as impulsivity, stubbornness and the need for closure affect the way in which an individual makes a snap decision and subsequently rates their confidence in their decision or changes their mind. Fifty-two participants from the University of Tasmania completed 3 personality inventories and a memory task. Participants were shown a study list of words to memorise. Half of these words appeared in the experimental phase as old‚ÄövÑvp words, and the other half were new‚ÄövÑvp. In a two-step decision process, participants were first to make a snap decision if the word was old or new. They were then to rate their confidence in their answer or change their mind if they made an error. Analysis showed that there were limited differences in the way that participants responded to the first decision. For the second response, the need for closure and dysfunctional impulsivity (a subset of impulsivity) were found to have the strongest correlation with the number of response reversals and the use of the high confidence option. However, a key limitation to the study was the small sample size, which prevents the null from being supported or rejected. Additionally, the inventory used to measure stubbornness was inadequate for differentiating between participants. In future replications of this study, a larger sample size should be used, and new measure of stubbornness should be developed.