HUMAN CLOSED MINDEDNESS is not only pervasive but also essential to our mental functioning. Without it, we would be forever suspended in a limbo of non-belief, incapable of crystallizing a single judgment or undertaking a single decision. However necessary, our need to ultimately close our minds at a given juncture has numerous negative consequences.

The nature of this particular need, its antecedent conditions and its cognitive and social consequences have constituted a long standing interest of mine, and has resulted in over 50 articles and publications in the theoretical and empirical literature in psychology. Whereas prior work related to closed mindedness emphasized the individual difference approach, and while my work assigned an important role to such differences and developed a special scale (translated into several different European and Eastern languages) designed to tap them, I also theorized about numerous situational conditions that may bring about closed mindedness. Many of these conditions have to do with the difficulty of information processing that persons may experience due, e.g. to time pressure, fatigue, ambient noise, or alcoholic intoxication. As for the consequences, we have demonstrated need for closure effects on stereotyping, attribution, impression formation, communication and language use among others.

A particularly exciting new line of research within the need for closure paradigm relates to its effects on group interaction and decision making. We have growing evidence to show that groups whose participants experience a high need for cognitive closure tend to develop a syndrome we have referred to as "group centrism". This includes the development of autocratic leadership, conservatism with regards to group norms, rejection of opinion deviates, conformity, and the tendency toward ingroup favoritism and outgroup derogation.