PONE-D-21-32282Need for Affect, Need for Cognition, and the Desire for IndependencePLOS ONE

Dear Dr. BARCELO SOLER,

Thank you for submitting your manuscript to PLOS ONE. After careful consideration, we feel that it has merit but does not fully meet PLOS ONE’s publication criteria as it currently stands. Therefore, we invite you to submit a revised version of the manuscript that addresses the points raised during the review process. Please consider reviewers' comments carefully and revise accordingly. I summarize major points raised by the reviewers.

1. The research needs to situate itself in the previous literature on the support of political independence in Catalonia or elsewhere (e.g., reviewer 1's points 2, 4, & 7; reviewer 2' point in linking NFA and NFC to the identity and instrumental models).

2. The author(s) need to more carefully lay out what has been controlled for (and how the controls were linked to the previous literature).

3. More detailed information should be given with regards to the development of the scales (reviewer 1' point 5, reviewer 2's comments regarding results that are not the foci of the authors' hypotheses).

4. I also notice that the two types of needs were highly correlated (r = .41) and feel that the interaction term is going to be problematic (how can you interpret something that is overlapping in nature that has interaction?) Also, judging from the interaction terms in the models, it is only in model 6 that this interaction becomes significant.

5. I am also not quite sure that I understand the logic of your proposed hypotheses. If NFA is a "general motivation to approach or avoid emotions or emotional inducing situations and includes the beliefs that emotions are useful for shaping judgments and behavior"; how does this general motivation translate to the positive attitudes toward independence? I am thinking that interaction terms of NFA and some demographic characteristics that may reflect the identity approach would be more coherent in the current framework. The same set of questions could be applied to the hypotheses of NFC. It seems to me that NFA and NFC catch different ways of processing information. However, how these processes could be linked to positive attitudes toward independence are not clearly laid out.

Please submit your revised manuscript by Apr 01 2022 11:59PM. If you will need more time than this to complete your revisions, please reply to this message or contact the journal office at plosone@plos.org. When you're ready to submit your revision, log on to https://www.editorialmanager.com/pone/ and select the 'Submissions Needing Revision' folder to locate your manuscript file.

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We look forward to receiving your revised manuscript.

Kind regards,

I-Ching Lee

Academic Editor

PLOS ONE

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Reviewers' comments:

Reviewer's Responses to Questions

Comments to the Author

1. Is the manuscript technically sound, and do the data support the conclusions?

The manuscript must describe a technically sound piece of scientific research with data that supports the conclusions. Experiments must have been conducted rigorously, with appropriate controls, replication, and sample sizes. The conclusions must be drawn appropriately based on the data presented.

Reviewer #1: Partly

Reviewer #2: Partly

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2. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously?

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

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3. Have the authors made all data underlying the findings in their manuscript fully available?

The PLOS Data policy requires authors to make all data underlying the findings described in their manuscript fully available without restriction, with rare exception (please refer to the Data Availability Statement in the manuscript PDF file). The data should be provided as part of the manuscript or its supporting information, or deposited to a public repository. For example, in addition to summary statistics, the data points behind means, medians and variance measures should be available. If there are restrictions on publicly sharing data—e.g. participant privacy or use of data from a third party—those must be specified.

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: No

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4. Is the manuscript presented in an intelligible fashion and written in standard English?

PLOS ONE does not copyedit accepted manuscripts, so the language in submitted articles must be clear, correct, and unambiguous. Any typographical or grammatical errors should be corrected at revision, so please note any specific errors here.

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

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5. Review Comments to the Author

Please use the space provided to explain your answers to the questions above. You may also include additional comments for the author, including concerns about dual publication, research ethics, or publication ethics. (Please upload your review as an attachment if it exceeds 20,000 characters)

Reviewer #1: This study provides results suggesting that some particular psychological attributes (“need for affect” and “need for cognition”) might contribute to the expressed support for political secession on a Western European democracy. It does so by studying the relationships between these individual psychological traits and the willing to secede on a huge sample (N>33.000) of Catalonian citizens who answered an online survey, during several months at 2013, at the peak of the secessionist effervescence that erupted in that Northeastern Spanish region at that time.

The study is well written, wisely argued and the technical analysis of the findings appears professional and sound. The justification for introducing psychological vectors as possible additional mediators of political decisions in turmoil situations is substantiated using the available literature on the issue. The discussion of the consistency and implications of the main findings, as well as some of its limitations, is also cogently presented.

The findings deserve to be known because they suggest that behind an unexpected urge for secession, in addition to identity, economic or other political vectors, individual psychological traits related mainly to emotional appetites played a non trivial role on a particular moment, at least, of the lively and enthusiast Catalonian secessionist movement (during several years, till it did’nt success failing to attain its goals).

The paper needs, however, substantial revision and refinements on different parts before being considered acceptable for publication.

Those are the main points that have to be addressed:

1. At the introduction and through the whole paper the desire for political independence in Catalonia is described as if it was an spontaneous and grass-rooted movement. It obviates that it had a continuous and firm direction by a Regional Government and an Autonomous Parliament both dominated by secessionist parties. As an example, Figure 1 is used to ilustrate the abrupt increase of the willing to secede between 2010-2013, neglecting to specify that such abrupt increase was, in fact, at 2012-2013, around the regional elections of 2012 that were called by a nationalist-lead Government that had changed from a decades-long moderate politics centered on enhancing devolution from Spain to a direct secession pathway.

2. In this respect, the paper fully obviates a rich literature that has showed the relevant role played by regional elites and particularly the demanding outbid between regional nationalist parties on igniting and feeding the movement (Barrio and RdzTeruel 2017; Barrio and Field, 2018; Rdz. Teruel and Barrio 2021); or the crucial propagandistic role played by local media under direct or indirect influence of a highly resourceful Regional Government (Oller et al, 2019).

3. The huge online sample is a convenient one but it’s not representative of Catalonian population. This is duly recognized but has to be addressed in a much more consistent way. Despite the cautions taken by weighing and adjusting scores to those of a corresponding CEO profile in one of its regular Barometers surveys, the final profile of the sample is biased and consists on a peculiar cluster of Catalonian citizenry: educated, middle and upper class, mature age males, pro-leftist, pro-secession individuals born inside Catalonia clearly predominated. So, the results might illustrate tendencies and propensities of an important fraction of Catalonian citizenry but not those from the majoritarian population at all. In addition to the peculiar profile provided by these socioeconomic variables, a single measure illustrates that: 62% in favor of secession is an oddity, both in the long series of CEO and CIS surveys, and in all electoral results in the last decade. So the relevance of that should be discussed much more thoroughly.

4. The author avoids contrasting the potencies of his main psychological variables here with other personality vectors previously studied by him in another study (Barceló 2017), on the same sample. That’s particularly surprising because his main predictor there “Agreableness”, is highly charged by emotional tones, and emotion appetites play a crucial role on his interpretation of the findings. In addition, the absence of a proper discussion of the role played by “Need for cognition” and its plausible relation to “Openess”, Intelligence or Education levels is also disappointing, because it reduces the analyses of individual psychological factors to a very narrow and perhaps inconsistent display. So, a full treatment and discussion of these complementary measures seems peremptory and might perhaps add to the role proposed for individual psychological factors on political options.

5. No references are given about translation and validation of the scales used to measure “need for affect” and “need for cognition”. The Catalan and Spanish translations (Supp. Information) are very poor, with obvious ortographical and gramatical errors, and that should not be obviated when discussing limitations and weaknesses of the findings.

6. References to previous studies that have explored differential emotional landscapes characterizing the secessionist and unionist segments of Catalonian citizenry seems mandatory at the discussion (Oller et al 2018, Tobeña 2016, 2017).

7. There is also an insufficient reference to studies that have showed important variations both on national identities and socioeconomic measures through the whole period of Catalonian secessionist effervescence, in longitudinal studies (i.e. Oller et al, 2019; 2020; 2021). The diagnoses of a transversal study made on a very particular moment should be compared and complemented with systematic and already well known longitudinal landscapes.

8. Regarding that, the lack of contrast of the obtained results with results from another similar online massive survey taken, at a different and crucial time during the secession bid, is a major weakness insufficiently discussed.

Only if all these insufficiencies and caveats are adequately solved the present paper should go to the press. The findings, though transient and only suggestive, are clearly interesting and they deserve to be known.

Reviewer #2: A review of the manuscript “Need for Affect, Need for Cognition, and the Desire for Independence”.

This study sets out to examine the role of two psychological factors in explaining intention to vote for Catalan independence from Spain. The study has an impressive sample size of over 35,000 Catalan respondents who are asked a battery of relevant questions, including two scales with good psychometric properties.

My general assessment of the paper is that it has a lot of potential but needs to be developed further, both theoretically and statistically. The author discusses two main reasons that have been suggested in the literature for why people support independence movements, the identity model, and the instrumental model. Why then, did the author choose to measure NFA and NFC in this study? There is no attempt to link NFA and NFC to the identity and instrumental models. In addition, a deeper dive into previous research relevant to the potential role of NFA and NFC in support for independence movements would have strengthened the paper.

The study includes the ten-item personality inventory without explaining why or what the results mean. Same can be said for some of the other demographic and attitudinal variables.

As for the reporting of data I would have liked to see descriptive statistics (not just correlations in the appendix) and reporting of explained variance in the regression tables.

The more detailed regression table in the appendix also reveals several curiosities I suggest the author incorporates formally into the paper. The role of left-wing ideology, higher education and income, turnout in 2012 (what does that stand for?), and the clear importance of speaking Catalan.

I was quite puzzled by the high predicted support from the models. While 62% of the sample supported independence for almost all the predictions mentioned in the manuscript they are much higher than that (usually around 85%). Maybe there is a clear statistical explanation for this, but I think it has to be provided.

Finally, I think it may be more appropriate to frame the main finding in terms of the only group that shows the weakest support for independence. The only group in the four-cell matrix of high-low NFC and high-low NFA is the “low-NFC and low-NFA” group.

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Reviewer #2: No

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PONE-D-21-32282R1Need for Affect, Need for Cognition, and the Desire for IndependencePLOS ONE

Dear Dr. BARCELO SOLER,

Thank you for submitting your manuscript to PLOS ONE. After careful consideration, we feel that it has merit but does not fully meet PLOS ONE’s publication criteria as it currently stands. Therefore, we invite you to submit a revised version of the manuscript that addresses the points raised during the review process. The current manuscript, though, has improved, according to reviewer 1, is not evaluated favorably by reviewer 3. I read the manuscript myself and agreed with the major concerns raised by reviewer 3. Please explain carefully how psychology needs could be linked with support for the independence and let this explanation be the focus of your introduction.

It seems to me that the proposed associations of the need for affect and need for cognition do not pertain only to the case in Catalonia and if you could find additional data to support/replicate the current findings, it will greatly increase the merits of the current manuscript.

Please submit your revised manuscript by Sep 12 2022 11:59PM. If you will need more time than this to complete your revisions, please reply to this message or contact the journal office at plosone@plos.org. When you're ready to submit your revision, log on to https://www.editorialmanager.com/pone/ and select the 'Submissions Needing Revision' folder to locate your manuscript file.

Please include the following items when submitting your revised manuscript:

• A rebuttal letter that responds to each point raised by the academic editor and reviewer(s). You should upload this letter as a separate file labeled 'Response to Reviewers'.
• A marked-up copy of your manuscript that highlights changes made to the original version. You should upload this as a separate file labeled 'Revised Manuscript with Track Changes'.
• An unmarked version of your revised paper without tracked changes. You should upload this as a separate file labeled 'Manuscript'.

If you would like to make changes to your financial disclosure, please include your updated statement in your cover letter. Guidelines for resubmitting your figure files are available below the reviewer comments at the end of this letter.

If applicable, we recommend that you deposit your laboratory protocols in protocols.io to enhance the reproducibility of your results. Protocols.io assigns your protocol its own identifier (DOI) so that it can be cited independently in the future. For instructions see: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/submission-guidelines#loc-laboratory-protocols. Additionally, PLOS ONE offers an option for publishing peer-reviewed Lab Protocol articles, which describe protocols hosted on protocols.io. Read more information on sharing protocols at https://plos.org/protocols?utm_medium=editorial-email&utm_source=authorletters&utm_campaign=protocols.

We look forward to receiving your revised manuscript.

Kind regards,

I-Ching Lee

Academic Editor

PLOS ONE

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Reviewers' comments:

Reviewer's Responses to Questions

Comments to the Author

1. If the authors have adequately addressed your comments raised in a previous round of review and you feel that this manuscript is now acceptable for publication, you may indicate that here to bypass the “Comments to the Author” section, enter your conflict of interest statement in the “Confidential to Editor” section, and submit your "Accept" recommendation.

Reviewer #1: All comments have been addressed

Reviewer #3: (No Response)

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2. Is the manuscript technically sound, and do the data support the conclusions?

The manuscript must describe a technically sound piece of scientific research with data that supports the conclusions. Experiments must have been conducted rigorously, with appropriate controls, replication, and sample sizes. The conclusions must be drawn appropriately based on the data presented.

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #3: No

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3. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously?

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #3: Yes

**********

4. Have the authors made all data underlying the findings in their manuscript fully available?

The PLOS Data policy requires authors to make all data underlying the findings described in their manuscript fully available without restriction, with rare exception (please refer to the Data Availability Statement in the manuscript PDF file). The data should be provided as part of the manuscript or its supporting information, or deposited to a public repository. For example, in addition to summary statistics, the data points behind means, medians and variance measures should be available. If there are restrictions on publicly sharing data—e.g. participant privacy or use of data from a third party—those must be specified.

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #3: Yes

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5. Is the manuscript presented in an intelligible fashion and written in standard English?

PLOS ONE does not copyedit accepted manuscripts, so the language in submitted articles must be clear, correct, and unambiguous. Any typographical or grammatical errors should be corrected at revision, so please note any specific errors here.

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #3: Yes

**********

6. Review Comments to the Author

Please use the space provided to explain your answers to the questions above. You may also include additional comments for the author, including concerns about dual publication, research ethics, or publication ethics. (Please upload your review as an attachment if it exceeds 20,000 characters)

Reviewer #1: All comments and suggestions have been thoroughly ans satisfactorily addressed. The paper has greatly improved

and must go swiftly to the print.

My only suggestion is for the Abstract: It should refer to the absence of relation between NFC and support for independence .

Some minor errors remain in the Catalan-language versions of questionnaires at the Appendix: i.e. "complexos" (instead of "complexes"; "requereixi" (instead of "requerixi"); Catalan sentences do not demand a proposition particle before direct complements.; the translation looks rather "formal" and "bureocratic", distanced from common use of the language. But that cannot be changed.

Reviewer #3: This is an interesting work connecting psychological underpinnings (of NfA and NfC) with the Catalonian independence support. The author uses a large n, non-representative adult sample to test the association between psychological motives and support for the secessionist movement in Catalonia. As much as one could find a number of interesting aspects in this manuscript, the theoretical disconnect makes it hard to comprehend the real research goal and the potential inferences in this study. I thus cannot be supportive of its publication in its current condition. I further explain my comments below.

First, the primary gap in this work is the disconnect between the psychological drives (i.e., NfA and NfC) that tap individual differences in the sample and preferences on the Catalonian secession. Generally, work that uses NfC or NfA relate these factors to thought processes (as used in the original seminal studies) or to mid-level concepts (e.g., Big5, different types of thinking processes, compassion/empathy). These concepts cannot be treated as factors that one just wants to control for in a study. There has to be some kind of theoretical reasoning linking how NfC and NfA explain actual preferences on secession. That is the biggest aspect missing in the current manuscript.

Second, Cognition and Affect are two of the basic constructs of thought processes that capture how and why people think/evaluate/prefer the way they do. These constructs explain the mechanism of whether a person’s thinking process is driven by cognitive assessments or affective evaluations. Similar concepts such as the Need to Evaluate or Uncertainty Avoidance explain the mechanism of thinking process, but not the behavioral outcome such as vote choice (or support for independence). The author repeatedly tries to connect emotions and cognition with the behavioral outcome in the findings section, but the evidence and discussions are quite weak.

Since I don’t think that there is a decent theoretical foundation associating NfC and NFA with support for independence, I may recommend the following alternatives: One option to link NfC and NfA to the support for independence may go through the Big5. One of the Big5 dimensions may promote higher/lower support for the independence. There is preceding work on how Agreeableness, Conscientiousness, or other factors may relate to ideologies, voting behavior, strategic decisions, and freedoms. Another alternative could be through the level of political learning and political knowledge. Both of these factors relate to thinking processes that NfC and NfA are associated with. Politically knowledge could reveal some interesting results.

On additional issue with this manuscript is the generalizability of the results. Can we relate the findings to other secessionist movements across the globe? Given that NfC and NfA are quite consistent psychological constructs, would they explain similar preferences in Canada, Scotland, or China? Or, could we say anything about Brexit? The authors touches upon that but could not develop the idea as the theoretical foundations are quite weak. If supported properly, I think that would be a quite important inference.

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7. PLOS authors have the option to publish the peer review history of their article (what does this mean?). If published, this will include your full peer review and any attached files.

If you choose “no”, your identity will remain anonymous but your review may still be made public.

Do you want your identity to be public for this peer review? For information about this choice, including consent withdrawal, please see our Privacy Policy.

Reviewer #1: No

Reviewer #3: No

**********

[NOTE: If reviewer comments were submitted as an attachment file, they will be attached to this email and accessible via the submission site. Please log into your account, locate the manuscript record, and check for the action link "View Attachments". If this link does not appear, there are no attachment files.]

While revising your submission, please upload your figure files to the Preflight Analysis and Conversion Engine (PACE) digital diagnostic tool, https://pacev2.apexcovantage.com/. PACE helps ensure that figures meet PLOS requirements. To use PACE, you must first register as a user. Registration is free. Then, login and navigate to the UPLOAD tab, where you will find detailed instructions on how to use the tool. If you encounter any issues or have any questions when using PACE, please email PLOS at figures@plos.org. Please note that Supporting Information files do not need this step.

PONE-D-21-32282R2Need for Affect, Need for Cognition, and the Desire for IndependencePLOS ONE

Dear Dr. BARCELO SOLER,

Thank you for submitting your manuscript to PLOS ONE. After careful consideration, we feel that it has merit but does not fully meet PLOS ONE’s publication criteria as it currently stands. Therefore, we invite you to submit a revised version of the manuscript that addresses the points raised during the review process.

 I have secured two reviewers' evaluations of the current manuscript and while one endorses the publication of the manuscript, one is more skeptical. The reviewer suggests a stronger link of NFC and NFA with political attitudes or judgements and recommends some papers that may be relevant for citations. Please consider incorporate them in the current manuscript. My reading is that it is very close to be accepted for publication but some revisions are needed. In addition to the literature the reviewer suggested, changes to some wording may be incorporated. On page 1, you refer NFC and NFA as traits but motivations throughout the manuscript, please replace traits with motivations.  Because you have a survey data set which was collected one time, please be very careful when you use the causal terms. In addition, in the sample section, you started with 37,535 participants being recruited, but this is not true. Information provided elsewhere suggested that you recruited at least 47,148 individuals or 93,469 (survey link being clicked). Please revise to remove the inconsistent information and making sure that it is clear that the number of 37,535 participants were the ones that are further analyzed. 

Please submit your revised manuscript by Jan 26 2023 11:59PM. If you will need more time than this to complete your revisions, please reply to this message or contact the journal office at plosone@plos.org. When you're ready to submit your revision, log on to https://www.editorialmanager.com/pone/ and select the 'Submissions Needing Revision' folder to locate your manuscript file.

Please include the following items when submitting your revised manuscript:

• A rebuttal letter that responds to each point raised by the academic editor and reviewer(s). You should upload this letter as a separate file labeled 'Response to Reviewers'.
• A marked-up copy of your manuscript that highlights changes made to the original version. You should upload this as a separate file labeled 'Revised Manuscript with Track Changes'.
• An unmarked version of your revised paper without tracked changes. You should upload this as a separate file labeled 'Manuscript'.

If you would like to make changes to your financial disclosure, please include your updated statement in your cover letter. Guidelines for resubmitting your figure files are available below the reviewer comments at the end of this letter.

If applicable, we recommend that you deposit your laboratory protocols in protocols.io to enhance the reproducibility of your results. Protocols.io assigns your protocol its own identifier (DOI) so that it can be cited independently in the future. For instructions see: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/submission-guidelines#loc-laboratory-protocols. Additionally, PLOS ONE offers an option for publishing peer-reviewed Lab Protocol articles, which describe protocols hosted on protocols.io. Read more information on sharing protocols at https://plos.org/protocols?utm_medium=editorial-email&utm_source=authorletters&utm_campaign=protocols.

We look forward to receiving your revised manuscript.

Kind regards,

I-Ching Lee

Academic Editor

PLOS ONE

Journal Requirements:

Please review your reference list to ensure that it is complete and correct. If you have cited papers that have been retracted, please include the rationale for doing so in the manuscript text, or remove these references and replace them with relevant current references. Any changes to the reference list should be mentioned in the rebuttal letter that accompanies your revised manuscript. If you need to cite a retracted article, indicate the article’s retracted status in the References list and also include a citation and full reference for the retraction notice.

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Reviewers' comments:

Reviewer's Responses to Questions

Comments to the Author

1. If the authors have adequately addressed your comments raised in a previous round of review and you feel that this manuscript is now acceptable for publication, you may indicate that here to bypass the “Comments to the Author” section, enter your conflict of interest statement in the “Confidential to Editor” section, and submit your "Accept" recommendation.

Reviewer #3: (No Response)

Reviewer #4: (No Response)

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2. Is the manuscript technically sound, and do the data support the conclusions?

The manuscript must describe a technically sound piece of scientific research with data that supports the conclusions. Experiments must have been conducted rigorously, with appropriate controls, replication, and sample sizes. The conclusions must be drawn appropriately based on the data presented.

Reviewer #3: Partly

Reviewer #4: Yes

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3. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously?

Reviewer #3: Yes

Reviewer #4: Yes

**********

4. Have the authors made all data underlying the findings in their manuscript fully available?

The PLOS Data policy requires authors to make all data underlying the findings described in their manuscript fully available without restriction, with rare exception (please refer to the Data Availability Statement in the manuscript PDF file). The data should be provided as part of the manuscript or its supporting information, or deposited to a public repository. For example, in addition to summary statistics, the data points behind means, medians and variance measures should be available. If there are restrictions on publicly sharing data—e.g. participant privacy or use of data from a third party—those must be specified.

Reviewer #3: Yes

Reviewer #4: Yes

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5. Is the manuscript presented in an intelligible fashion and written in standard English?

PLOS ONE does not copyedit accepted manuscripts, so the language in submitted articles must be clear, correct, and unambiguous. Any typographical or grammatical errors should be corrected at revision, so please note any specific errors here.

Reviewer #3: Yes

Reviewer #4: Yes

**********

6. Review Comments to the Author

Please use the space provided to explain your answers to the questions above. You may also include additional comments for the author, including concerns about dual publication, research ethics, or publication ethics. (Please upload your review as an attachment if it exceeds 20,000 characters)

Reviewer #3: I enjoyed reading the revised version of the ms. Although we see minor changes in the written text, the response letter gives a bit more context and detail to reviewer comments. I must admit that I am still skeptical about the strength of the theoretical connection between NFA&NFC and the behavioral support for secessionism. Two important concerns come to mind:

First, the author claims that we may not have a preference about what those who score high in NFC would desire for Catalan independence. I disagree because one of the principal aspects of NFC is that people high in need for cognition tend to have persistent attitudes that are resistant to counterarguments (Haugtvedt and Petty, 1992). Besides, those who score high in NFC tend of have judgments that are more thoughtful, and have stronger attitudes making their behavior more predictable (Petty et al., 1995). With that, why could not we have clear predictions about high NFC people’s preferences for independence? The theory could lead us make expectations prior to empirical insignificant effects.

Second, I think the author needs to be selective in the work associating NFA&NFC and the behavioral outcomes. Going back to the original works of Cacioppo and Petty in 1980s up until today, there must have been more than a few hundred publications using these two psych domains across an array of attitudinal and behavioral outcomes. Yet, the author lists (in the response letter) some that vaguely relate to political attitudes or behavior. I thus recommend referring to recently published work on these and related psych domains in the field with relevance to political attitudes and judgments.

One minor issue: On page 26, in the revised section, “outside of the developed word” is repeated.

Cited works

Haugtvedt, Curtis P and Richard E Petty (1992) Personality and Persuasion: Need for cognition moderates the persistence and resistance of attitude changes. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 63(2): 308–319.

Petty, Richard E, Curtis Haugtvedt and Stephen M Smith (1995) Elaboration as a Determinant of Attitude Strength: Creating attitudes that are persistent, resistant, and predictive of behavior. In Richard E Petty and John A Krosnick (eds) Attitude Strength: Antecedents and Consequences. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 93–130.

Reviewer #4: This is an interesting piece that builds on research that incorporates NFA and NFC into political decision making. The large-n survey is also very impressive and allows the authors to estimate the two-way interaction of continuous variables well.

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Reviewer #3: No

Reviewer #4: No

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Need for Affect, Need for Cognition, and the Desire for Independence

PONE-D-21-32282R3

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