Abstracts

Regulatory focus and thinking style

Guo Tieyuan University of Macau

Previous research has found that people have two different self-regulatory foci: prevention focus and promotion focus. People are vigilant under prevention focus because prevention focused individuals are sensitive to security needs, whereas eagerness are dominant under promotion focus because promotion focused individuals are sensitive to personal growth. Consequently, prevention focus might foster analytic and logic thinking whereas promotion focus might foster holistic and intuitional thinking. We manipulated participants’ regulatory focus across 3 studies, and found that participants with a prevention focus engaged in more relational categorization (Study 1), preferred non-contradiction arguments (Study 2), and relied more on formal logic in the evaluation of syllogistic arguments (Study 3) than those with a promotion focus, who engaged in more taxonomic categorization, preferred naive dialectical arguments, and relied more on intuition in reasoning. Thus, the studies provided converging evidence that people are more likely to engage in analytical reasoning, and rely more on logic when they were prevention focused, whereas they are more likely to engage in holistic thinking, and rely more on intuition when they were promotion focused