Online shopping has gained more and more popularity over the years, naturally, leading to an increase in the number of e-commerce websites. From a variety of websites users can choose the one that best suits their needs depending on different factors, such as information or easy navigation. E-commerce websites have the aim to sell, thus besides providing information and easy navigation other strategies such as persuasion are implemented on the website to increase its selling performance. Some of the well-known persuasive design factors and how they influence user’s purchase behaviour will be discussed in this study. The purpose of this thesis is to investigate the effects of persuasive design factors on purchase intention, as well as to assess the effect of the need for cognition as a user condition on the relationship. Based on the literature review, a theoretical framework is proposed to accomplish the aim of the thesis. For the empirical evidence, a quantitative approach was taken, with the help of two online questionnaires (one with persuasive factors and one without persuasive factors). A non-probability convenience sampling approach was used for gathering data. The results of the study provide evidence that using persuasive design factors on an e-commerce website can increase the likelihood of purchase intention. The findings do not conclude the mediating role of attitude towards using the website, yet a relationship between attitude and purchase intention was found. The moderating effect of need for cognition was not established.

Die induktiven Denktrainings von K. J. Klauer gehören zu den am umfangreichsten und gleichzeitig erfolgreichsten evaluierten kognitiven Trainings im deutschsprachigen Raum. Die vorliegende Arbeit untersuchte das induktive Denktraining Keiner ist so schlau wie ich (KISSWI) für Vor- und Grundschulkinder. Studie 1 dieser Arbeit prüfte zunächst, ob ein für die Umsetzung in Gruppen adaptiertes KISSWI-Training vergleichbar wirksam ist, wie das originale KISSWI für Einzelsettings. Hierfür wurden 192 Kinder (97 Vorschulkinder und 95 Erstklassenkinder) untersucht. Es fanden sich keine Effekte des KISSWI-Gruppentrainings auf induktives Denken (dEG vs. KG(Klauer)=+0.07), kognitive Fähigkeiten im Allgemeinen (dEG vs. KG(Klauer)=–0.01) oder sozial-emotionale Fähigkeiten (dEG vs. KG(Klauer)=–0.05). In den Studien 2 und 3 wurde geprüft, ob Wechselwirkungen zwischen dem KISSWI-Gruppentraining und Need for Cognition (NFC) sowie dem Fähigkeitsselbstkonzept (FSK) der trainierenden Kinder bestehen. In Studie 2 mit 121 Kindern (60 Vorschulkinder und 61 Erstklassenkinder) wurde bei den trainierenden Kindern insgesamt ein kleiner positiver Zusammenhang (r=+.22) zwischen NFC zu Trainingsbeginn und der anschließenden Steigerung kognitiver Fähigkeiten während des KISSWI-Gruppentrainings gefunden. Außerdem steigerten die Kinder mit KISSWI-Gruppentraining ihr NFC geringfügig stärker, als ohne Training (dEG vs. KG(Klauer)=+0.21). Studie 3 (N=70 Zweitklassenkinder) fand bei allen trainierten Kindern keinen bedeutsamen Zusammenhang zwischen ihrem FSK vor Trainingsbeginn und ihrer anschließenden Steigerung kognitiver Fähigkeiten während des Trainings (r=–.07). Auch wurde kein Einfluss des KISSWI-Gruppentrainings auf die Veränderung des FSK der Kinder festgestellt (dEG vs. KG(Klauer)=+0.07).

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Need for Cognition is a personality trait that describes an individual’s inclination to seek out and enjoy cognitive effort. This disposition has been of interest to psychological research for multiple decades now, and findings show that it is related to more engagement in learning, higher self-efficacy, and higher academic achievements. However, it has long been established that effort is something that is generally avoided, so the individuals and scenarios which deviate from this general rule are of great interest to behavioural science. Finding out why effort is sought out, in which ways it is perceived differently, whether this is context-dependent, and what kind of consequences this has for everyday life—all these aspects are necessary to better understand individual differences in cognitive effort preference. This understanding has important implications for theoretical and practical applications, ranging from educational strategies and workplace dynamics to health interventions. Such interventions could maintain or increase well-being, a concept that encompasses several dimensions, including hedonic and eudaimonic well-being. Hedonic well-being refers to the pursuit of pleasure and avoidance of pain, while eudaimonic well-being centres on the pursuit of meaning, personal growth, and self-fulfilment, which requires more effort. As an investment trait, it is therefore likely that Need for Cognition is related to the kind of activities that individuals engage in to increase their well-being. The goal of this thesis is to examine the role of Need for Cognition in well-being, to shed light on the specific relationship between these two constructs and the factors and mechanisms that might be involved in it. In Study 1, we reviewed over 140 studies on the association of Need for Cognition and various aspects of well-being, combining a qualitative literature review with nine meta-analyses. The meta-analyses yielded small to medium effects, showing that higher Need for Cognition was associated with reduced neuroticism, depression, anxiety, burnout, negative affect, and public self-consciousness, and increased positive affect, satisfaction, and private self-consciousness. Higher Need for Cognition fostered active, interest-driven behaviours, which enhanced knowledge acquisition, self-efficacy, and thereby self-confidence in dealing with academic, personal, and interpersonal challenges. However, under some circumstances, the impact of Need for Cognition on well-being appeared to be dependent on third variables such as self-control or the social environment. In other situations, Need for Cognition was associated with lower well-being, suggesting the possibility of a sense of overconfidence in one’s abilities and resources which leads to more noxious behaviours. This possibility of an overestimation of one’s own resources depending on Need for Cognition was further explored with preregistered analyses in Study 2 using questionnaire data from 180 teachers from the first wave of the Covid-19 pandemic. We first replicated an analysis of possible mediators between Need for Cognition and a reduced sense of personal efficacy, an aspect of burnout. Neither self-control, nor habitual use of reappraisal or suppression as an emotion regulation strategy reached significance as a mediator, which was not in line with the findings of Grass et al. (2018) in teacher trainees. When including the years of teaching experience in the model, self-control mediated between Need for Cognition and the sense of personal efficacy, suggesting that the mechanisms that in- or decrease a teacher’s burnout risk depend on the career stage. In a structural equation model we then found that teachers with higher Need for Cognition had lower burnout scores because they perceived their own resources as more fitting to their job’s demands and felt less overwhelmed by these demands, while the opposite pattern was associated with higher burnout scores. A sense of boredom in the form of one’s resources exceeding the demands was neither related to Need for Cognition nor to burnout scores. The perception of demands and resources fully mediated between Need for Cognition and burnout, indicating that dispositional cognitive effort investment has important protective effects for one’s sense of self-efficacy, but bears the risk of overestimating oneself nonetheless. In Study 3 we applied these practical insights to foundational research in a Registered Report, examining how Need for Cognition affects effort discounting behaviour. We adapted an existing effort discounting paradigm by Westbrook et al. (2013) to enable the computation of subjective values for different task levels without resorting to the objective effort for reference. Online questionnaires, an inlab working memory task with four difficulty levels, and the adapted paradigm were completed by 116 university students. We found that over a third of participants preferred a more difficult level over the easiest one, and that participants with higher Need for Cognition valued the most difficult level higher and the easiest level lower than participants with lower Need for Cognition did. The difficulty level itself and the accuracy of responses during the working memory task predicted the subjective values of the levels, while reaction time did not, a pattern that stayed consistent across 63 different data processing pipelines. An exploratory analysis showed that even though participants with higher Need for Cognition valued difficult levels higher and found them less aversive, there were no differences in subjective effort, reaction time, or accuracy compared to participants with low Need for Cognition, which further supported the possibility of overestimation. In conclusion, the findings of this thesis have advanced our understanding of the role of Need for Cognition in well-being. One of the main findings is the overestimation of one’s own resources in individuals with high Need for Cognition, which is facilitated by an increased level of self-control and self-efficacy beliefs. This self-perception is evident both in the workplace and in a basic research paradigm. It can be assumed that the inflated perception of own resources results from differences in the type of task engagement between individuals with higher and lower Need for Cognition. Those with higher Need for Cognition engage more frequently in actual tasks, which result in an increase in resources through skills and experience. More importantly, they engage much more frequently in hypothetical tasks, which result in a perceived increase in resources even though no actual skills were tested and no actual experience was gained. This task engagement pattern promotes a heightened but less accurate sense of self-efficacy in individuals with higher Need for Cognition. In the long term, this overestimation can have a negative impact on well-being but is offset by the predominantly positive associations of Need for Cognition with various aspects of well-being. Further research can now address the question of what influences this overestimation and how it can potentially be mitigated to derive implications for theory and practice. The data and analysis code from all three studies are openly available so that others can reproduce the results, explore patterns, or test new hypotheses.

In light of recent persuasive appeals which promote a food product's health or nutritional benefits in advertisements, this exploratory study investigates the ways in which individuals read and understand health and nutrition-related claims in advertising and make subsequent judgments about the product, brand, and purchase intentions. Using the Elaboration-Likelihood model of persuasion, this study looks at how motivational (e.g., health consciousness, need for cognition) and ability (nutrition knowledge) factors influence attitudes toward three food products following exposure to manipulated advertisements containing a nutrition-related claim. Although the results do not demonstrate much support for the predicted relationships, the findings nonetheless provide researchers useful information that may benefit future studies. / Master of Arts

How to design effective persuasive information security messages to motivate individuals’ engagement in recommended protective security behaviors has become a top priority in the information security field. Although fear appeals have been shown to be an effective means to influence individuals’ security-related protective behaviors, recent information security research has called for a deeper understanding of recipients’ information processing of messages to design effective fear appeals. Previous IS security research has explored two individuals’ information processing routes of security messages, the central route, and the peripheral route, and has investigated the impacts of central variables, perceived argument quality, and peripheral variables, perceived source credibility, on individuals’ security protective behaviors. However, it is not clear how personal disposition influences the process. Drawing on the elaboration likelihood model (ELM), this dissertation identifies need for cognition as an important factor that influences employees’ information processing (Study 1). Results show that need for cognition significantly moderates the relationship between perceived security argument quality and individuals’ behavioral intention. In addition, although most of the previous research has emphasized the importance of perceived argument quality (the central route) in influencing individuals’ security protective behaviors, the understanding of how to improve individuals’ perception of argument quality is far from conclusive. Thus this dissertation takes the view that the preference matching between message characteristics and recipients’ preference is one of the key mechanisms that increase individuals’ perceived security argument quality and behavioral intention. In particular, I conducted a multi-group experiment design to examine how preference matching, the matching between the rhetoric of a security message and recipients’ preferences for rhetoric (Study 2), influences individuals’ perception of security argument quality and behavioral intention to adopt the recommended security behavior. I found that preference matching significantly influences perceived argument quality and behavioral intention. The results have important theoretical and practical implications for designing effective information security messages to improve information security management in both personal and work environments

This study examines the effect of deep approaches to learning on development of the inclination to inquire and lifelong learning over four years, as an essential graduated outcome that helps students face the challenges of a complex and rapidly changing world. Despite the importance of the inclination to inquire and lifelong learning, some literature has attempted to operationalize this concept in practical ways. In another limited line of studies, researchers explored how the education process and deep approaches to learning affected students' cognitive development among first-year undergraduates. This dissertation focuses on the ways that the process of deep approaches to learning influences the development of the inclination to inquire and lifelong learning through the positive feelings from information acquisition and the conceptual change from meaningful structure of information. The individuals in the sample were 1,914 first-year undergraduate students participating in the Wabash National Study on Liberal Arts Education at each of the 17 institutions in the study. This longitudinal study was designed to use three waves of data to control for student background characteristics, institutional types, overall exposure to organized instruction, and other college experiences. The current study employed ordinary least squares regressions with a weighting algorithm and also investigated whether the effects were general or conditional based on differences in race, gender, precollege total academic preparation, and precollege measure of need for cognition. Using longitudinal, pretest-posttest deign with statistical control, this study found that the higher-order learning subscale, the integrative learning subscale, and reflective learning subscale generated a significant positive effect on the development of inclination to inquire and lifelong learning over four years. Furthermore, the study demonstrated that the effect of deep approaches to learning appear to be general rather than conditional. In summary, the results confirm that the growth of inclination to inquire and lifelong learning can be fostered through deep approaches to learning. The findings suggest that higher education educators should create a developmentally-appropriate learning environment for students to organize their knowledge into cognitive structure, which fosters the capacity for lifelong learning.

ELM模式把過去紛歧的說服理論作一整合，成功地解釋了過去在說服理論及實證上的歧異。然而，不同的文化下有不同的溝通型態，ELM模式是否能放諸四海而皆準呢？本研究主要目的是希望了解ELM模式在文化迥異於美國的臺灣消費者是否依然成立呢？ 　　本研究主要是以Petty & Cacioppo的ELM模式為研究之架構。根據ELM模式，個人有處理訊息的動機及能力時，將會採中央路徑的訊息處理方式，此時影響態度的主要因素為論點品質；反之，若個人缺乏處理訊息的動機或沒有處理訊息的能力時，則會採取周 　　路徑的訊息處理方式，此時影響態度的主要因素為周邊線索。在本研究中，我們以論點品質（強／弱）的作為中央線索的操弄，以推薦人的知名度、受喜好程度（名人推薦人／非名人推薦人）作為周邊線索的操弄。以投入程度（高／低）及認知需求的高低（以量表衡量）來研究其對兩路徑說服效果的影響。 　　研究結果發現： 　　1、高投入程度者較低投入程度者顯著地對目標產品有較正面的態度。 　　2、名人推薦人效果略優於非名人推薦人。 　　3、強論點效果顯著地優於弱論點效果。 　　4、與國外實證結果不同的是，本研究的交互效果皆不顯著，此結果正突顯出，本研究所提出之文化差異對廣告說服力之影響。也就是東方文化較傾向於地域依賴，而西方文化較傾向地域獨立。 / Systematic variation across cultures in many psychological phenomena have been found by many previous studies. This study incorporate on of them, i. e., need for cognition, into a consumer behavior model, i.e., the Elaboration Likelihood Model. In this paper, the reason why the development of an individual's need for cognition is governed by cultures is explored and the relationship between need for cognition and persuasive effectiveness of media communication is established. Undergraduates at NCCU participated in the experiment. Subjects were randomly assigned to each of the cells in a 2(involvement:high or low) x 2(celebrity status:famous or infamous) x 2(argument quality: high or low)factorial design. Our study has not provided support for the view that different features of an advertisement may be more or less effective, depending upon a person's involvement or need for cognition. The result is not consistent with that of other studies conducted in the western culture. The possible explanation may be due to the culture differences in that the Chinese culture is field dependent while the western culture is field independentas hypothesized.