Individual Differences in Tendency for Design Fixation

Abstract

Not all individuals may be equally susceptible to design fixation. We sought to identify characteristics that could predict individual tendency for design fixation, and explored the use of Kruglanski’s Need for Closure Scale for this purpose. We devised an experiment to determine whether correlations exist between participants’ score on this scale and the degree of fixation in concepts elicited. Specifically, engineering-student participants were asked to complete the Need for Closure Scale as well as develop concepts for which an example solution was provided. Two statistical techniques, the Mann-Whitney U test and ordinal logistic regression, showed that participants’ Need for Closure scores correlated significantly with degree of fixation in generated concepts.