Think about the last time you had to make a difficult choice, or had to wait to figure out what to do. For some people, any decision-making process is stressful, can elevate blood pressure, and may cause distress. How do you feel in spaces of uncertainty? Do you tolerate ambiguity well, or do you find the state of unknowing insufferable?
If you’re a bit intense about getting to a clear-cut answer and you have no patience for slow decision-making, you may have a high need for closure.
Urgency and Permanency are Features of a Need for Closure
People with a high need for closure are internally driven to avoid uncertainty and want to land on a decision as fast as possible. They “seize” and then “freeze” (Webster & Kruglanski, 1994). In other words, their motivation includes both urgency (“let’s just get to an answer!”) and, once a decision is made, permanence (“It’s done. It’s settled”).
While the need for closure may be affected by circumstances, it is largely understood to be a dispositional trait (Webster & Kruglanski, 1994). This means that, like extroversion, agreeableness, and other personality variables, some people tend to be higher (or lower) with a need for closure.
There are Critical Downsides to a High Need for Closure
A high need for closure is generally recognized as a liability. This is rather interesting, considering how a cognitive drive to finalize a decision may come from a need to safeguard the self. Why live in ambiguity and anxiety when an answer could be made? This drive to avoid ambiguity, however, comes at a cost.
Evidence suggests, for example, that a strong need for closure aligns with close-mindedness, essentialist thinking, prejudice, and challenges with change (see review: Roet et al., 2015). Forget innovation, people high in a need for closure prefer the familiar, the status quo. Indeed, a running theme among people with a high need for closure is a strong resistance to change.
What Harms in Some Situations May Benefit Relationships
Whereas in many contexts (e.g., organizations), resistance to change presents a considerable impediment, a bias towards permanence may help relationships.
Indeed, every relationship has its ups and downs. Persisting through the “down” times is necessary for prolonged relationship stability. Might a need for closure encourage stability during difficult relationship periods?
A Need for Closure Focuses on the Familiar
Recent research evaluated how a strong need for closure might, despite its costs in other domains, help couples stay together (Ses et al., 2025). Along with a general satisfaction with familiarity, people high in a need for closure may invest more in their relationships in stressful times (anything to prevent the possible uncertainty of a pre-breakup period). They may also tend to eschew any potentially attractive alternative partners, given their predisposition toward familiarity.
Satisfaction, investment, and disinterest in other potential partners are all features of the investment model (Rusbult, 1980); they are known predictors of commitment. If the need for closure drives these facets of the investment model, it could very well promote relationship stability.
The Hidden Benefit of a Need for Closure
Can a need for closure help couples stay together? Ses and colleagues (2025) out of Turkey explored this question using the investment model as a framework and conducting five studies that involved over 2000 participants drawn from both university and community samples.
With evidence from both concurrent and longitudinal methods, their findings point to a hidden benefit of a need for closure. While the exact mechanism for the link requires additional study, a need for closure reliably predicted romantic commitment (Ses et al., 2025). In other words, people with a high need for closure are biased toward staying with their partners.
Decision-Making Essential Reads
Closure Means Commitment
If a current relationship is the “status quo,” some people are all for keeping it. They thrive in the familiar and like the certainty of being with their current partner. If times are rough, these individuals are ready to make sacrifices, perhaps to avoid a decision-making space (e.g., “should I leave?”). A need for closure, independent of other personality variables, predicts romantic commitment (Ses et al., 2025).
These findings are especially compelling because they remind us that aspects of ourselves that might make life harder in some contexts may support us in others. While the results require replication, particularly before generalizing across cultures or relational contexts, and we don’t yet know how a need for closure translates into greater commitment, the current results add new complexity to the need for closure, pointing to its strengths.
