Cognitive Styles in Psychology: Decision Making and Vaccination Beliefs

Running head: COGNITIVE STYLES IN PSYCHOLOGY. 1
COGNITIVE STYLES IN PSYCHOLOGY
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COGNITIVE STYLES IN PSYCHOLOGY. 2
Abstract
An individual typical decision making style affects greatly the quality of their decisions. The
most common strategies that are used in an attempt to modify negative believes that people have
towards vaccinations is appealing to evidence-based reasoning (Kozhevnikov, 2007). This study
was conducted on 332 year one psychology students as part of their course requirement. The
students completed different measures of cognitive style including Personal Need for Structure
(PNS), Causal Uncertainty scale (CUS) and Vaccination Statements (VS) (Volkova, & Rusalov,
2016). The PNS scale in this experiment comprised of twelve different item which were set to
test the degree to which a person could wish to simplify and order their living environmental
conditions. PNS as a measure of cognitive styles was found to comprise of desire for structure
and response to lack of structure as the two major subscales (Rietzschel, De Dreu, & Nijstad,
2007). Those students who participated in this study responded through the six-point scale
ranging from “strongly agree” to “strongly disagree”. In this study PNS measure was found to be
significant at a 0 .83 level of significance.
The CUS measured an individual’s ability in determining what the real cause of social events is
(Tobin, & Raymundo, 2010). Student who responded to the experiment did so though the six
point scale ranging from “strongly agree” to “strongly disagree”. Additionally, the study found
that CUS had a significant level of 0.88 which was acceptable. VS consist of 20 items, with 10
pro-vaccination items and 10 anti-vaccination items (Monto, 2010). He Participants responded to
these statements using a five-point scale ranging from strongly “disagree” to “strongly agree”. The
10 pro-vaccination items were recorded so that high scores indicated higher levels of anti-vaccination

COGNITIVE STYLES IN PSYCHOLOGY. 3
attitudes and combined with the anti-vaccination attitudes. The study showed that VS was significant
at alpha level of 0.75.
Results
correlation 1 2 3
VS - - -
cus .13** -
pns .39** .17** -
* Significant at p< .05, ** significant at p< .01
We analyzed the scores on the cognitive styles measures by determining the average score across
all the participants. We reported Pearson correlation coefficients as presented in Table1 above. In
order to maintain statistical power, he study subjected us into choosing a significance level of
p< .05; this was to create an acceptable and effective platform for rejecting or failing o reject the
null hypothesis.
We correlated various personality measures (personal need for structure, and Causal uncertainty
scale) on belief and decision making about vaccination and found a significant Pearson
correlation (r = .39 and .13). The result indicated a relationship between the predictor variables
and the outcome. However, the results from the data indicated some kind of with our expectation
where by a higher PNS scores could relate to an increased degree of mean decision error at (r
= .39). Results for CUS didn’t highly concur with the prediction as higher CUS score had a
prediction with shorter mean decision accuracy.