Research on “intolerance of uncertainty” says it’s going up, but it also says we don’t have to fight it
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I’ve been having a lot of conversations with friends recently about tolerance for uncertainty. I’d like to believe, about myself, that I’m very comfortable with ambiguity and uncertainty. I think the truth is that I’m not, I’m only comfortable with uncertainty in certain situations. But that hasn’t always been true; my discomfort with uncertainty has been going up. And it turns out I’m probably not alone.
Intolerance for uncertainty is the idea that (to put it super simply) uncertainty makes us feel bad, and it seems to be going up pretty universally. One study from back in 2018 showed a statistically significant increase between 1999 and 2014. And I could be wrong, but I have a hard time believing that we’ve gotten MORE comfortable with uncertainty since 2014.
There’s this thing that I love from Rebecca Solnit’s work Hope in the Dark. She says that optimism and pessimism are basically the same thing: “Well, I know how this is going to go, so I don’t need to worry about it!” (optimism) or “Well, I know how this is going to go, so I don’t want to even bother trying” (pessimism). Optimism and pessimism are both a way of… basically pretending to have certainty? wishing to have certainty? Their opposite, she says, is hope, which is an embrace of uncertainty and a recognition that in the uncertainty lies opportunity for change.
I’m not good at this, at least not right now. We are in a time with many uncertainties, so right now feels like the olympics of trying to have hope, or be comfortable with uncertainty. But I think for those of us who work in tech, and are building the technology of not just the future but of today, this conversation matters.
So I’ll share something I found in the research that gave me hope. There are a few different variations of models for what tolerance or intolerance of uncertainty even is, psychologically and behaviorally. The one I like best, for many reasons, highlights that neither tolerance nor intolerance for uncertainty is actually bad or good. Both are just ways of relating to the mix of ambiguity, complexity, and probability that make something difficult to predict, and both have their pros and cons.
Broad strokes, based on research into how medical practitioners relate to this: intolerance of uncertainty can lead to an approach that is better informed and more deliberate but also potentially one that is slower and actually more likely to contain half-truths, while tolerance of uncertainty can lead to an approach that is more open and more courageous but also potentially poorly informed and more likely to be careless or sloppy.
So really, the best thing we can do is be aware of how we are orienting toward the uncertain. Are we ourselves being blindly or dogmatically optimistic or pessimistic? Because that’s intolerance of uncertainty thinking. Or we are fluidly moving back and forth, both embracing our optimism or pessimism, AND making space for an uncertainty that can reveal a different path forward? Thanks for listening.
Sources: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29882726/ and https://www.researchgate.net/publication/7133147_Fearing_the_unknown_A_short_version_of_the_Intolerance_of_Uncertainty_Scale and https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/s11606-020-06538-y.pdf