Assessing Rational And Intuitive Styles: A Human Information Processing Metaphor

This article has four distinct but related purposes. First, we describe the research setting for assessing human information processing style in terms of the rational‐intuitive complementarity. We highlight earlier management study that directly deals with this dimension. Then we review popular instruments for assessing style in rational‐intuitive terms. Second, we outline a conceptual model that elaborates the rational—intuitive styles of human information processing into three modes each. There are innovative management studies, and Eastern and Western philosophical bases for this model. We use this background to help synthesize three lines of neurophysiological research to formulate a six‐mode human information processing (HIP) metaphor. Third, we use the HIP metaphor to develop an HIP survey with a scale for each mode. This section describes how conceptual definitions are derived from the model with guidance from the rational‐intuitive term pairs and the survey item pool. Finally, we describe the statistical analysis of the reliability and validity of the six scales for the HIP survey. We use a criterion‐based factor analytic approach for isolating the scale items. Then, the HIP metaphor is used to predict associations among the scales in our study. We use a modified form of the multitrait—multimethod approach to test our predictions. Finally, this section summarizes the results of the predicted relationships among the variables on the self‐assessment tools used in this study. The study helps bring the rational—intuitive assessment of human information processing into the mainstream of management research.