Psychological need to reduce ambiguity?

[firecat]

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/12/111221140627.htm

Excerpt:

In a new article published in Current Directions in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, Arne Roets and Alain Van Hiel of Ghent University in Belgium look at what psychological scientists have learned about prejudice....

People who are prejudiced feel a much stronger need to make quick and firm judgments and decisions in order to reduce ambiguity. "Of course, everyone has to make decisions, but some people really hate uncertainty and therefore quickly rely on the most obvious information, often the first information they come across, to reduce it" Roets says....

It's virtually impossible to change the basic way that people think.

I'm very curious about that last statement. 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'm obviously assuming here that tolerating ambiguity would generally be a good skill to have (although I think it might lead to problems in situations where immediate action is required). I really dislike prejudice and the damage it causes, so if training in tolerating ambiguity might help diminish it, I would be in favor.

I think I've learned to tolerate ambiguity a lot better over the years, so my personal experience makes me doubt the assertion that it's impossible to change the way people think. It's possible that being on antidepressants is what made the difference for me, though.

Comments

The basic way people think

[flarenut]

This one seems like a tautology to me. It all depends on how "basic" you think certain operations are, and how you frame the operations in question. "Tolerance for ambiguity" is itself a way ambiguous phrase -- for example, does it mean comfort with not knowing what class of entity something fits into, or does it mean comfort with knowing that something fits into a class one of who characteristics is ambiguity? (Same thing with racism and other prejudices -- does familiarity cause people to become in general more comfortable with people who are not like them, or "merely" to move a certain subset of people not like them into the "OK" category?)

I think that shortcut to reduce ambiguity are a basic operation, but the fact that we use those at all (the basic operation you can't change) may not say that much about the circumstances under which we use them (non-basic operation, at least in my taxonomy.)