Abstract: Need for Cognitive Closure is one of individuals’ stable cognitive characters. It describes individuals’ motivation to process information systematically when people are facing ambiguous situations. Many researchers found that need for cognitive closure has significant influence on individuals’ information processing and decision making. Generally speaking, individuals with high dispositional need for cognitive closure are more likely to rely on heuristics to make decisions, so they commit to cognitive traps such as over-attribution and primacy effect more frequently. Even though most researchers regarded need for cognitive closure as a stable cognitive character, others found that it could be changed to some degree by environmental factors such as noise in a short term. Thus, in a specific study need for cognitive closure can either be measured by a scale, or be manipulated by changing the level of environmental noise or time pressure. Previous literatures have some limitations as well. Firstly, few studies have been done to investigate how to make people with high dispositional need for cognitive closure to process information systematically. Secondly, almost all of the studies were conducted in laboratories so their external validity may suffer. Thirdly, even though it seems obvious that need for cognitive closure could be applied to the area of conflict research, this promising topic has been neglected totally so far. More studies are expected to overcome those limitations

Key words: need for cognitive closure, information processing, decision making