The Relation of Critical thinking disposition and Need for cognition with Tolerance for Ambiguity: Rational - Intuitive Information Processing Style as Mediator

The purpose of the present study was to The Relation of Critical thinking disposition and Need for cognition with Tolerance for Ambiguity: Rational - Intuitive Information Processing Style as Mediator. The statistical population study consisted of the students in Yasouj University, and Students 400 were selected based on the available sampling method using Krejcie and Morgan table. The research method was descriptive and correlational, and bootstrap method and Structural equation modeling (SEM) was conducted to examine the model. The instruments for data gathering included, Critical thinking disposition Scale (Stanwich and West, 2007), Need for cognition Scale (Cacioppo, Petty and Cao, 1984), Tolerance of Ambiguity Scale (Herman et al., 2010) and Rational-Experiential Inventory for Adolescents (Epstein, 1998). The results showed that Critical thinking disposition and Need for cognition had a significant positive correlation with Tolerance for Ambiguity; Also, Critical thinking disposition had a significant positive correlation only with Intuitive Style and Need for cognition, with both Rational-Intuitive Information Processing Style. Also, the only Intuitive Processing Style had a mediator role between Critical thinking disposition and Tolerance for Ambiguity; And both Rational-Intuitive Information Processing Style had a mediator role between the Need for cognition and Tolerance for Ambiguity in this study. Therefore, one may conclude that revising the educational system of schools and universities can help to increase the Critical thinking disposition, the Need for cognition and Information Processing Styles, and finally Tolerance for Ambiguity of students.