Extent of information processing

in educational settings, purchase settings and other decision making contexts. For example, Curseu (2011) explored the effect of NFC on active information seeking in the classroom. The extent of advice seeking in small student groups was investigated with 213 master students who were instructed to form groups of 3 to 7 members. It was shown that NFC was an important asset for active information seeking. People high in NFC reported a higher tendency to actively seek advice from their teammates when they were asked to solve a complex problem regarding a group assignment than people low in NFC.

In consumer behavior research, external information search, which is defined as “the attention, perception, and effort directed toward obtaining environmental data or information related to the specific purchase under consideration” (Verplanken, Pieter, Hazenberg, & Palenewen, 1992, p. 85), can also vary as NFC increases. Verplanken et al. (1992) presented

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participants with an information board that displayed a 3 (brands) X 10 (attributes) matrix and asked them to indicate the brand and attributes about which they wished to receive information (An information board is an instrument commonly used in consumer research where brands and attributes of the brands are listed. The content of the attributes are covered and can only be revealed when participants ask to see them). They found that participants scoring low in NFC expressed a desire for fewer attributes than participants who scored high in NFC. Furthermore, participants with high NFC generated more thoughts relevant to the task (e.g., mentioning an attribute, a brand and search strategy) than participants with low NFC, which suggested that more cognitive effort was expended by those with high NFC.

Building on the findings of Verplanken et al. (1992), Verplanken (1993) examined the interactive effect between NFC and time pressure on external information search preceding a purchase decision. They found that regardless of the absence or presence of time pressure, high NFC participants generated more task-related thoughts and they also reported expending more effort than low NFC participants. However, high NFC participants did not actually search for more information than low NFC participants even though in Verplanken et al. (1992) high NFC participants expressed a desire for more information. This indicates that even though high NFC participants did not appear to search for more information than low NFC participants, they could have processed information more intensively by reading it more carefully than low NFC

participants.

Bailey (1997) investigated whether or not NFC affected decision strategy in the context of employee hiring. Managers low, medium and high in NFC were asked to engage in judge and choice response modes: in the former condition participants were asked to evaluate job

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they received on an information board. Bailey (1997) found that high NFC participants conducted more thorough searches (asked to see content of more attributes) than low NFC participants. Even though the choice response mode by nature demanded fewer searches, high NFC participants still produced thorough searches.

The relationship between NFC and complex problem solving in management was explored in Nair and Ramnarayan (2000). The authors defined complex problems as problems that were not routine and did not have well-defined solutions. To solve such problems an individual should have a tendency to actively and persistently engage in thinking, thus a high NFC individual was predicted to gather a greater amount of information, gather more diverse information, and be more effective in solving complex problems. Participants in the study were presented with a case description of a company and asked to manage all affairs of the firm as its CEO. The findings showed that as NFC increased, the diversity of information sought about the company increased, but the amount of information sought did not significantly correlate with NFC, which once again shows that NFC may manifest itself in other characteristics of

information processing rather than just the amount of information sought.

The positive relationship between NFC and the amount of information processed has been observed in Web search. Das, Echambadi, McCardle, and Luckett (2001) showed that individuals with higher NFC tended to use the Web for information seeking to a greater extent than those with lower NFC based on self-report data collected from a questionnaire. Similarly, Tuten and Bosnjak (2001) found that NFC was positively correlated with Web usage in gathering product information, current events and news, and in learning and education. Both studies

demonstrated that a higher orientation to thinking motivated Web search. Different amounts of information processing were also distinguished in studies of Web design. Sicilia, Ruiz, and Jose

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(2005) investigated the effect of Website interactivity on information processing. Based on the connection between ELM and NFC, the authors hypothesized that low NFC searchers would rely more on Website interactivity (the peripheral route) rather than Website content (the central route) for determining navigation paths. Therefore, low NFC participants would increase information processing when using an interactive site to a greater extent than high NFC participants. To measure the amount of information processing, participants were instructed to write down all the thoughts that occurred to them after exposure to the sites. While both groups produced more product- and Website-related thoughts when exposed to an interactive than a non-interactive Website, the amount of increase was only significant for low NFC participants.

Amichai-Hamburger, Kaynar, and Fine (2007) examined the effects of Website

interactivity and time pressure on Website preferences between high and low NFC individuals. Participants were asked to determine whether or not they were willing to spend $10 downloading a software program on a commercial site in four conditions: interactive Website with time

pressure, interactive Website with no time pressure, flat Website with time pressure, and flat Website with no time pressure. Results showed that low NFC participants were more likely to choose the site when using an interactive Website while Website interactivity had no significant effect on the Website preference among high NFC participants. It was also shown that

participants high in NFC spent more time surfing than participants low in NFC. Yet high and low NFC participants did not differ in the number of hyperlinks clicked. The findings provide further support that high NFC individuals are prone to spend more time gathering information and are less likely to be influenced by peripheral information cues present in interface design.

Kaynar and Amichai-Hamburger (2008) broadened the scope by examining the effect of NFC on the use of thirty different Internet services that were divided into three major types:

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professional, social and leisure. They found that NFC was positively associated with the use of professional services such as using email or real-time messaging for work related purposes and acquiring information for study purposes, but not with the other two uses. NFC also was found to be positively correlated with perceived importance of information in creating a persuasive site and negatively correlated with perceived importance of environmental characteristics (i.e., graphical searcher interface and technological advancements) in creating a successful site. Not only was the finding consistent with previous studies in that high NFC people valued more central than peripheral cues, the finding that people high in NFC tended to expend cognitive effort only in work-related activities might also suggest that individuals with high NFC will be more likely to devote more effort searching on work-related search tasks than non-work-related tasks.

While Amichai-Hamburger et al. (2007) examined only one peripheral cue, Website interactivity, on Website usage and found no relationship with high NFC individuals, Crystal and Kalyanaraman (2005) distinguished between two Website features and found that they had different effects on high NFC individuals. The moderating role of NFC on the relationships between two usability guidelines, informative feedback and descriptive labeling, and search performance were investigated in an online health information seeking context. Participants were presented with a health-related Website in four conditions: feedback and labeling, no feedback and labeling, feedback and no labeling, and no feedback and no labeling. During the experiment participants were instructed to look for information on the assigned Website in order to answer five multiple choices and five free-response questions. High NFC participants generally

answered more questions correctly than low NFC participants. The lack of labeling did not seem to deteriorate the search performance of high NFC participants but it significantly affected the

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performance of low NFC participants. The absence or presence of feedback influenced high NFC participants’ attitudes toward the Website but not low NFC participants’. These findings suggest that high and low NFC people may react to usability problems differently. Carenini (2001) also demonstrated that not all interface features were treated as peripheral cues by high NFC

individuals. They found a positive relationship between NFC and usage of dynamic querying, an interactive technique for database querying, during a real-estate search task. The finding suggests that high NFC potentially increases a person’s willingness to use complex interface features to accomplish a demanding search task.

Scholer et al. (2013) investigated whether NFC mediated the extent to which a list of documents, with varying densities of relevant and non-relevant documents, impacted people’s relevance judgments of those documents. While the researchers did not find that NFC mediated this relationship, their study participants did not differ greatly with respect to NFC, so lack of variance on this measure might have prevented them from observing an impact.

2.3.2 Summary. Most studies have demonstrated that high NFC leads to increased

information processing by way of accessing more information, accessing a greater diversity of information, processing information more thoroughly, or spending more time in search. While it may be challenging to generalize findings from some of these studies to search, findings from other studies are more applicable to the present study. Several studies showed that argument or content quality influenced high NFC individuals more while interface features affected low NFC individuals to a greater extent, and ELM provides a way to explain why high NFC and low NFC searchers process information with different strategies given different SERP characteristics. These studies provide useful perspectives to predict and explain if and how people with different NFC exhibit differences in query stopping and task stopping, for instance, some people may

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search deeper than others under certain SERP characteristics. Investigating the interplay between NFC and SERP characteristics can perhaps shed light into the role NFC plays in search stopping behaviors while interacting with SERPs.

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