Do you seek effortful thinking, or only tolerate it?
What it argues
Need for cognition measures the extent to which a person seeks and enjoys effortful thinking, independent of intelligence. It predicts how you spend unstructured time and how you react to ambiguity.
The probe
Score the eighteen-item need-for-cognition scale. Then check whether your leisure actually matches the score.
The source
The Need for Cognition, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 42 — John Cacioppo and Richard Petty, 1982. The link goes to the text or to a catalogue record for it, not to a summary. This one is a catalogue record: the entry gives you the question and the probe, not the argument in the author's words.