The purpose of this study was to develop a Japanese version of the Need for Cognition Scale (NCS). Forty-five items, which had been used in the United States to measure NCS, were administered to three groups. Subjects in the first and second groups consisted of university students, and these groups were surveyed in succession with an interval of one year. Further, subjects in the second group answered the items twice with one month between administrations. Subjects in the third group were not university students. Each set of data obtained from the three groups was factor analyzed and one major factor was extracted. The fifteen items, which gave high loadings on the first factor and had no sex difference on scores, were selected as the Japanese version of NCS. The reliability of NCS was confirmed by the test-retest method, the split-half method, and the internal consistency method. Construct validity was also examined.