firecat

At what point does the "basic way" that a person thinks develop? Is it nature or nurture, and in what proportions? If it's true that some people need to reduce ambiguity more than others, do we know what contributes to that? Is it possible to teach people to tolerate more ambiguity, or to tolerate ambiguity in more situations?

I think the trick would be to teach people to (1) reduce the amount of immediate threat people perceive in "the other" (or to put it another way, to feel less fear when faced with individuals that do not conform to the norm they have developed in and adapted to) and (2) not to tolerate ambiguity so much as to confine the dislike of ambiguity to elements of living that do not impact human and societal interaction (because you're right about wholesale increase in tolerance of all ambiguity would be stifling and probably even dangerous). Which might be difficult given that we humans aren't really as evolved as we like to think in terms of our hardwiring. Then again, I'm an ethologist at heart, so I tend to see a lot of the "uglier" aspects of human behavior (be more pessimistic about the ability to correct it, perhaps) in terms of that outlook.

I'd be interested to see a study of how infants react to exposure to people of different races, etc. Maybe --- and this is just a for-instance --- a white baby who squalls just because a person of color is bending over their crib is the kind of person for whom "fear-of-the-other" reduction training (or whatever) would be of benefit.