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Episode: Sitting With Uncertainty

Author: Hidden Brain, Shankar Vedantam
Duration: 00:50:50

Episode Shownotes

It can sometimes be exciting when we don't know what's coming next. Other times, the unknown can be deeply troubling. This week, we talk with researcher Dannagal Goldthwaite Young about how we respond to uncertainty, and why this psychological trait plays a surprisingly large role in shaping our behavior, perspectives

— even our political beliefs. If you'd like to learn more about the intersection between psychology and our political views, check out these other Hidden Brain episodes: Moral CombatUS 2.0: Not at the Dinner TableUS 2.0: What We Have in Common

Summary

In this episode of Hidden Brain, Shankar Vedantam and researcher Dannagal Goldthwaite Young explore uncertainty's profound impact on decisions and beliefs. Through personal anecdotes, including Dana's experiences with improv comedy and her husband's health crisis, they illustrate how individuals cope with unpredictability. The discussion connects psychological traits such as need for closure and tolerance for ambiguity to broader political perspectives, highlighting how these traits shape opinions on social issues and media consumption, ultimately emphasizing the need to understand differing worldviews in a polarized society.

Go to PodExtra AI's episode page (Sitting With Uncertainty) to play and view complete AI-processed content: summary, mindmap, topics, takeaways, transcript, keywords and highlights.

Full Transcript

00:00:00 Speaker_06
This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedanta. In the 19th century short story, The Lady or the Tiger, a young man is caught having an affair with a princess. When the king finds out, the young man is subjected to a peculiar form of justice.

00:00:17 Speaker_06
He must choose between two identical doors. Behind one door is a beautiful lady. Behind the other, a ferocious tiger. If he picks the lady, he will marry her according to the king's decree. If he picks the tiger, the beast will kill him.

00:00:40 Speaker_06
The princess uses her influence to find out which door hides the tiger and which one conceals the lady. But in so doing, she also realizes that the lady is her rival. She doesn't want her lover to marry the lady.

00:00:55 Speaker_06
She also doesn't want him to be eaten by the tiger. As the young man confronts the two doors, he beseeches the princess for help. She discreetly signals to him to pick the door on his right. Has the princess surrendered her lover to her rival?

00:01:12 Speaker_06
Or has jealousy won? Has she mocked the youth for death by tiger? The young man opens the door that the princess has indicated. And then, the story ends. It's left up to the reader to imagine what might have happened.

00:01:36 Speaker_06
Some might see this as a brilliant ending to a brilliant story. Others might find it deeply unsatisfying, even frustrating.

00:01:46 Speaker_06
Today on the show, we examine a psychological trait that plays a surprisingly large role in shaping our behavior, perspectives, even our political beliefs.

00:01:58 Speaker_06
The science of how we respond to uncertainty and the important lessons it has for how we organize our lives. This week on Hidden Brain. Are you the type of person who flies by the seat of your pants?

00:02:28 Speaker_06
Who prefers to live life whimsically and spontaneously? Or do you prefer order and structure, meticulously planning out every detail in advance?

00:02:38 Speaker_06
At the University of Delaware, Danigal Goldthwait-Young studies how our capacity to deal with uncertainty has pervasive effects on our lives, our relationships, even our political affiliations. Dana Young, welcome to Hidden Brain.

00:02:53 Speaker_02
Thanks so much for having me.

00:02:55 Speaker_06
Tanna, I want to take you back to the year 1999. You had just moved to Philadelphia for grad school. The first week you were there, you were at a bar with some new friends, and one of them started talking about improv comedy.

00:03:09 Speaker_06
I understand that you had some experience with this world.

00:03:12 Speaker_02
I did. So as an undergraduate at the University of New Hampshire, I had done improv comedy for four years in a company called Theater Sports, and I had directed a long form group.

00:03:24 Speaker_02
And so when these two young men talked about how they were in a professional improvisational comedy company called Comedy Sports, I couldn't believe it.

00:03:34 Speaker_02
We spoke the same language, and they said that their annual auditions were happening two days later.

00:03:42 Speaker_06
Dana agreed to go to the audition.

00:03:58 Speaker_02
who was the company's director, who congratulated me and told me that they were super excited to have me as a member of the company. And he said our new player training would be starting on Sunday at 5 p.m.

00:04:13 Speaker_02
and that new player training would go for 10 weeks. And I said, I'm so sorry, I don't think that I can actually be in this improv group.

00:04:24 Speaker_06
Wait, you're saying you declined?

00:04:26 Speaker_02
I literally declined, and he was as shocked as you are right now. He said, I don't understand.

00:04:32 Speaker_02
And I said, well, you told me the location of these trainings, and it's on the other side of Philadelphia, and I don't know how to get there, and I haven't started my graduate school classes yet, and I think I have to say no.

00:04:48 Speaker_02
And he said, take the subway like everyone else. And it's a wonderful part of town. You just walk down through Old City and it's fine. And I said, I'm nervous. I've never done it before. I'm afraid I might get, I don't know, mugged. It's dark.

00:05:05 Speaker_02
He said, it's August. 5 p.m. is not dark in August. And he said, listen, Dana, do me a favor. Just come to the first rehearsal. Just the first one. and then just see what happens. And so I did.

00:05:22 Speaker_06
And how did it go, Dana?

00:05:25 Speaker_02
It was, first of all, the walk from the subway stop to the location of the rehearsal was beautiful. It was through Society Hill in Queen Village. It was cobblestone streets and cute little coffee shops. So yeah, he was right. And no, I didn't get mugged.

00:05:41 Speaker_02
And it was life-changing.

00:05:48 Speaker_02
So what I loved about the early trainings was learning about some of the guidelines of improv comedy, which had to do with yes and, which is accepting the offer that your scene mate gives and then just building upon the last offer given.

00:06:07 Speaker_02
Early in those trainings, I realized that while I was very funny and I made people laugh and I was very goofy and physically funny, I actually don't think that I had ever learned how to be a very good improviser when I was an undergraduate.

00:06:24 Speaker_02
I realized that when I started scenes with a partner, I would tend to script the scene, which means instead of just giving an offer and then letting my scene mate build upon it,

00:06:38 Speaker_02
I would, I would, you know, to exaggerate a bit, I would get on stage and say, Hey, Betty, my sister, how are you? It's great to see you here in this candy store, you know, which doesn't allow for your scene partner to add.

00:06:53 Speaker_06
You've locked her into being your sister and locked yourselves into being in a candy store.

00:06:57 Speaker_02
Correct, but what it offered me was a sense that like I knew exactly what was going on.

00:07:03 Speaker_02
I didn't have to stress out So Mike would say let's try that again and this time just give one offer and then just listen and I think that I I think that it made me a much better improviser

00:07:25 Speaker_06
Not long after they began doing improv comedy together, Dana developed a crush on Mike. When she confessed this to him, Dana learned that Mike felt the same way. The two began dating.

00:07:37 Speaker_06
A few months into the relationship, Mike asked Dana to go on a backpacking trip with him. The destination? Kauai.

00:07:44 Speaker_02
So we met in Honolulu, but we had to take a puddle jumper plane to get to Kauai. Well, when we landed in Honolulu, I realized that my luggage with my clothing had never made it onto the plane from Newark, New Jersey. And I was so stressed out.

00:08:04 Speaker_02
I mean, I had my carry-on, which had, of course, my necessities and underwear and toiletries, but I didn't have any clothing. And Mike didn't see this as a huge deal, really. He said, well, turns out there's a Walmart right near the airport in Kauai.

00:08:22 Speaker_02
Why don't we just get you a bathing suit, tank tops and shorts and flip flops, and you have your sneakers on so we can still hike. I think we're fine. But for a good 24 hours, I was stuck. I was stressed. I was angry.

00:08:41 Speaker_02
I felt really kind of out of control without my belongings. And I probably wasn't too pleasant to be around. Even though we did go to Walmart, I got everything I needed.

00:08:55 Speaker_02
I learned later, actually, that Mike was pretty stressed about my reaction in that moment, because he worried about, well, one, our kind of compatibility, because I was so stuck, but also about what would that say about how I might be able to deal with, you know, bigger crises in life, you know?

00:09:18 Speaker_02
And so I think that that concerned him.

00:09:24 Speaker_06
In some ways, I'm hearing an echo of what you told me a second ago about improv, because of course, when the luggage didn't show up, Mike says, okay, this is the new offer. You know, Dana has shown up in Hawaii without her luggage. What do we do next?

00:09:37 Speaker_06
And how do we move forward from here? And you're like, no, no, no, no, no, wait, go back. Let's make sure we get the luggage before we move on. And in some ways, it was the same dynamic that you described during improv.

00:09:49 Speaker_02
It is the same dynamic. And in improv, we call it accept and build. So you accept your scene partner's offer and you build upon it. And the worst thing of all to do is say, no, but. Because no, but doesn't get you anywhere.

00:10:05 Speaker_02
Even yes, but doesn't get you anywhere. It just highlights the problems. And so what I was doing in that moment was I was saying, no, but, yes, but.

00:10:15 Speaker_02
I'm stressed, but when I needed to just accept and build and say, accept the situation and build upon it and go camping on a beach with my new Walmart shorts.

00:10:31 Speaker_06
Mike's fears about their compatibility didn't last long and they did not break up. In fact, they grew closer.

00:10:38 Speaker_02
We were best friends, totally in love. We got married in 2003. We had a baby boy in December of 2004. And then we moved into our new home in the suburbs in August 2005.

00:10:58 Speaker_06
So during this time, you were finishing your graduate studies at the University of Pennsylvania, but you were also interested in exploring a career in performance and comedy.

00:11:07 Speaker_06
And at one point, you took a job at a little television program called The Daily Show while they were in town covering the Republican National Convention.

00:11:16 Speaker_06
Stephen Colbert was on the show at the time, and you got to talk with him about what life was like as a stand-up comedian. What did you ask him, and what did he tell you?

00:11:25 Speaker_02
He asked what I studied, and I told him that I studied the effects of media on attitudes, knowledge, and behaviors. And he said, so what do you do next?

00:11:34 Speaker_02
And I said, well, I'm finishing my master's degree, but I'm thinking of going to New York to do improv. And he said, what would you do otherwise if you didn't go to New York? And I said, I would stay here at Penn and get my PhD and be a professor.

00:11:52 Speaker_02
He said, and if you did that, would you have to pay for it? I said, probably not. I would probably get a research assistantship from the university and have a tuition waiver.

00:12:03 Speaker_02
He said, why would you ever try to make it in comedy when you have this opportunity? And I couldn't believe it. I said, well, because I love making people laugh. And he said, I have been in this business such a long time, Dana. It has been grueling.

00:12:22 Speaker_02
It has been long. It's been arduous. And I love it. But there's a lot of rejection. And there's a lot of not knowing exactly where your next paycheck is going to come from, right? And he said, I really think that you should get a PhD.

00:12:36 Speaker_02
And it wasn't like he and I were buddies, right? It was just we had a very friendly relationship on the set.

00:12:42 Speaker_02
But he was just saying, look, I see you, and I see someone who is similar to me, and you do improv, and you're thinking I'm going to make it big. And he was like, it's a lot harder than you think. And that stayed with me.

00:12:58 Speaker_06
I'm wondering if he may have picked up on the fact that you are someone who does not deal well with uncertainty.

00:13:05 Speaker_06
And I think what he was painting was a picture that the life of a stand-up comic, a life in comedy, was a life that was filled with uncertainty.

00:13:14 Speaker_02
That is so wild. I've actually never thought of that. But I pretty much broadcast how I'm feeling at every moment on my face, so it's totally possible.

00:13:28 Speaker_06
So in many ways, life is going very well for you, Dana. You and Mike are married. You have a child, a son. You just bought a new home. But later that year, Mike began having some medical problems. What was going on?

00:13:43 Speaker_02
Mike was always so healthy. I mean, he didn't smoke cigarettes, he didn't drink alcohol, and he was very physically active. And in August of 2005, he started having bright flashes in his peripheral vision.

00:13:59 Speaker_02
And we didn't think much of it, but I could tell that he was distracted by it and started to get kind of quiet. Saw an ophthalmologist who said that he would need to go in to get an MRI.

00:14:14 Speaker_06
In October 2005, Mike went in for that MRI. The day the test results came out, Dana was at home working. The phone rang. When we come back, the call that changed Dana's life. You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedanta.

00:14:49 Speaker_05
This is Hidden Brain.

00:14:50 Speaker_06
I'm Shankar Vedantam. In 2005, Dana Young seemed to have it all. She was married to her best friend. Both of them had jobs they loved, and they were also doing improv comedy together. They had a new home and a new baby.

00:15:07 Speaker_06
But that October, Mike began seeing bright flashes of light. His doctor recommended an MRI. Dana, on the day Mike went in for his scan, you were at home working. Can you tell me what happened?

00:15:22 Speaker_02
The phone rang, like phones do, and it was Mike saying that the results confirmed that he had what the ophthalmologist had feared, which was a brain tumor pressing on his optic nerve.

00:15:41 Speaker_02
It just hit me in a way that you never really know when heavy news like that comes, how you're gonna react. It just didn't feel real.

00:15:54 Speaker_02
He assured me, he said, if it is what he thinks it is, it's not cancerous and the prognosis would be really good because it's not something that's malignant, that's taking over other structures, but it means that we're gonna need to see a brain surgeon.

00:16:13 Speaker_02
This was gutting. I took to bed. I couldn't really get out of bed for a couple days.

00:16:22 Speaker_02
I had some friends who were trying to give me some tough love and say, you know, your baby boy needs a mom who's out of bed and you're not really helping Mike right now. It was very hard.

00:16:42 Speaker_06
Later that year, in November, Mike had the surgery that his doctors recommended.

00:16:48 Speaker_02
And it was quite successful. There were a few tiny cells that they could not remove because, as the surgeon put it, if we pull on those cells, Mike doesn't wake up. But unfortunately, the tumor grew back.

00:17:06 Speaker_06
So this was not benign then?

00:17:09 Speaker_02
It was benign. But the cells themselves, because it didn't take over other structures, right? But the problem is the brain is only so big and the skull is only so big. So there's only a certain amount of space.

00:17:22 Speaker_02
And when those cells began to themselves grow and fill with fluid, it created a cyst that was even bigger than the original tumor. And it began to press on all of the regions of the brain that are responsible for

00:17:40 Speaker_02
vision and, you know, knowing you need to use the bathroom. And the big one is memory. Mike lost his short-term memory, which made living independently impossible.

00:17:59 Speaker_06
One evening, Dana broke down with the unfairness of it all.

00:18:03 Speaker_02
We were not out of the woods. And I cried and I said how unfair it was. It's just not fair. And he said, why is it not fair? I said, well, we're just starting out. We're just married. We're in love. We're best friends. We have a baby. We just bought a house.

00:18:19 Speaker_02
He said, who would it be fair to? Would it be more fair if I didn't have a partner? Would it be more fair if I didn't have a baby? He had this way of saying things so simply and It really stopped me in my tracks. And I thought, well, he's right.

00:18:36 Speaker_02
Fairness has nothing to do with it. He said, it's not about fairness. It has nothing to do with fairness. It's just random. The universe is random. This is random.

00:18:51 Speaker_06
Did you find these words comforting, Dana?

00:18:54 Speaker_02
At the time, I found them really frustrating. It felt like a very Mike thing to say, not like a very Dana thing to say.

00:19:03 Speaker_02
But it also made me understand that if I was going to be helpful to him, any kind of thoughts that I had about it being not fair or me being angry, I should probably not put in his lap.

00:19:17 Speaker_06
Yeah. I mean, in some ways, it's on a much, much more serious scale. It's a variation of what happened once you landed in Hawaii and your luggage didn't show up. He's saying, well, these things happen. It's random.

00:19:29 Speaker_06
And you're saying, well, this is really unfair. And you're stuck on what actually happened.

00:19:34 Speaker_02
Yeah, exactly right. And it was like, just like with the luggage, I was like, but now I need to fix it. And he was like, or you could just enjoy the vacation, because we're only here for seven days.

00:19:47 Speaker_02
And with the brain tumor, I was so angry and so stuck. I was like, I just need to fix it. And I'm a lot of things, but I'm not a brain surgeon. So I started thinking, maybe I can find the origins of where this came from.

00:20:02 Speaker_02
maybe it came from his workplace. You know, he works at a company, and I know there was some other guy at this company who had cancer last year. So even though Mike's wasn't cancer, I thought, oh, well, maybe their workplace is making them sick.

00:20:18 Speaker_02
Then I thought, oh, well, in this new neighborhood that we moved to, there's this old diaper factory site that is an environmental problem, and they're trying to clean it. Maybe that environmental site caused something.

00:20:34 Speaker_02
So I was on the internet for hours at night looking up like, you know, Superfund sites, etc. And at this point now, Mike was back in the hospital because he had had complications. So this was probably like February.

00:20:51 Speaker_02
And I'm really down the rabbit hole, because now I'm really mad. Because now it's clear that he's not going to be just one surgery, radiation, and fine. So I started going into these sort of conspiracy theory rabbit holes on the internet.

00:21:09 Speaker_06
Why do you think you were doing this, Dana?

00:21:12 Speaker_02
It felt good. It felt really good. I felt completely out of control. And going down these rabbit holes gave me maybe people I could be mad at or companies I could be mad at.

00:21:28 Speaker_02
And I've learned since then that anger is such a weird emotion because we think of it as a negative emotion. But I think that ignores the fact that anger can bring about a sense of direction and optimism. Because it has a momentum to it.

00:21:48 Speaker_02
It has a target. You're angry at someone. So it felt good.

00:21:59 Speaker_06
Mike passed away in 2006. In time, as Dana made her way through grief, she came to see that her own reaction to his illness reflected her extreme distaste for uncertainty.

00:22:25 Speaker_06
As a scholar, she was also studying how people deal with uncertainty in very different ways. One was how willing they were to cope with ambiguity.

00:22:35 Speaker_02
People who have a high tolerance for ambiguity tend to be really comfortable with situations that are uncertain and unpredictable. They're really okay with change. They don't need a lot of routine in their world.

00:22:48 Speaker_02
They can be spontaneous and it doesn't stress them out. And people who are high in need for closure are quite the opposite. They really prefer routine and order and structure and predictability in their lives.

00:23:01 Speaker_02
in their interactions and in their sort of physical environments.

00:23:07 Speaker_06
So the psychologist Arie Kruglansky once came up with a scale for this need for closure. I'm wondering if you could say more about this body of research, Dana. Can you talk about some of the items on Kruglansky's checklist?

00:23:20 Speaker_02
Sure. It includes items including, I don't like situations that are uncertain. Now people are asked to say to what extent they agree or disagree with these. So I don't like situations that are uncertain.

00:23:36 Speaker_02
I dislike questions which could be answered in many different ways. I find that a well-ordered life with regular hours suits my temperament. I usually make important decisions quickly and confidently.

00:23:53 Speaker_06
If you find yourself agreeing with these statements, chances are you have a high need for closure. The scale also explores some dimensions that indicate a higher tolerance for ambiguity or a low need for closure.

00:24:07 Speaker_02
These are, I tend to struggle with most decisions. When considering most conflict situations, I can usually see how both sides could be right.

00:24:18 Speaker_02
Need for closure is really designed to capture the extent to which individuals need a certain kind of order in their lives, in their interactions with others. And once you start thinking about both sides of this coin, right?

00:24:35 Speaker_02
High need for closure and high tolerance for ambiguity as having, you know, equal sets of strengths and weaknesses, right? They're different strengths and different weaknesses. but they both can be wonderful and they both can be a hindrance.

00:24:51 Speaker_06
I mean, I'm thinking about what happened with you and with Mike once he got this diagnosis.

00:24:56 Speaker_06
You know, you went down these rabbit holes of trying to establish if it was, you know, some toxic chemical from the diaper factory that had caused him to get sick.

00:25:04 Speaker_06
And really what you're looking for is I'm dealing with a situation of high ambiguity, high uncertainty.

00:25:11 Speaker_06
And if I can just locate the culprit that's responsible for all of this, in some ways it moves you from that world of uncertainty to a world of predictability and closure.

00:25:21 Speaker_02
And this is why this trait has become so pivotal in research on belief in conspiracy theories and misinformation. Conspiracy theory beliefs are really rooted in a very simple causal mechanism. They say that

00:25:39 Speaker_02
Whatever the crisis is or the horrible event is, it's not some complex systemic thing. It is something that has been caused by powerful people operating in the shadows to benefit themselves and harm others.

00:25:58 Speaker_02
And it provides a really quick closure to what could be a complex problem.

00:26:06 Speaker_06
There's another trait that's related to our capacity for uncertainty, and it's called a high need for cognition. What does this mean, Dana?

00:26:17 Speaker_02
So high need for cognition is something that comes to us from researchers named Cacioppo and Petty. And they introduced a theory of persuasion and they thought, you know, some people, it's not that they're smarter necessarily.

00:26:32 Speaker_02
It's not that they have more knowledge necessarily. It's that they really just enjoy thinking for the sake of thinking. And people who enjoy thinking actually are less likely to be persuaded by more emotional or heuristic kind of appeals.

00:26:53 Speaker_02
They require evidence-based argumentation to be persuaded by information.

00:27:00 Speaker_06
They're more analytical in other words.

00:27:02 Speaker_02
Exactly.

00:27:04 Speaker_06
How is this connected to our capacity to deal with uncertainty or how does it influence it?

00:27:10 Speaker_02
I think about need for cognition as something that's a bit of a luxury, because if you're high in need for cognition, it signals that you have the time, you feel that you have the time and security to be able to dedicate to thinking about something for a long period of time.

00:27:31 Speaker_02
Having high need for cognition is actually correlated with people who are less likely to be monitoring their environments for threat.

00:27:39 Speaker_02
If you're not monitoring for threat and you're not looking around the corner to see who's lurking, you can just, you know, I call it cud chewing. You can chew your cud all day.

00:27:49 Speaker_02
You could write a cost-benefit analysis of every possible decision you could make. You can write your pro-con list and you can just sit there and think.

00:28:04 Speaker_06
So in many ways, our brains are wired to make sense of the world. We are sense-making animals. And each of these traits in some way speaks to our drive to make sense. How quickly do we need to make sense of the world?

00:28:17 Speaker_06
How much are we willing to live with uncertainty? This difference turns out to have ramifications in all kinds of different areas. One of the areas that you have looked at and others have looked at is in our appreciation of aesthetics.

00:28:31 Speaker_06
Can you talk about how our capacity to deal with uncertainty, these different factors, our tolerance for ambiguity, our need for closure, how it affects our perceptions of art?

00:28:42 Speaker_02
The research on the psychology of aesthetics and aesthetic preferences is so cool. These are scholars who have looked at the psychological and personality traits that predict whether or not people enjoy abstract art or more realistic art.

00:29:01 Speaker_02
whether people prefer stories with very clear endings where the plot is completely wrapped up at the end, or if they prefer stories where everything is kind of left open for us to interpret.

00:29:14 Speaker_02
These studies are so cool, and the one thing that is consistent across them, which really gets you thinking, is that people who are high in tolerance for ambiguity are the ones who are most appreciative of abstract art,

00:29:30 Speaker_02
first of all, and of stories that don't have clear endings. And we also find in this literature the role of need for cognition as well, that people who enjoy thinking about things and really kind of struggling to solve problems.

00:29:47 Speaker_02
These are the same people who really enjoy abstract art and syncopated jazz, for example, over really predictable like pop music or country music that has a more predictable cadence, chorus, and verse structure.

00:30:06 Speaker_06
I understand that you sometimes explain the difference in how we perceive art by talking about two paintings involving women who wear hats.

00:30:16 Speaker_02
Yes, I was so excited when I, you know, it's very hard to find visuals to illustrate some of these things, but I was so excited when I found that both Renoir and Picasso had painted pictures of women wearing hats. Obviously, they look very different.

00:30:34 Speaker_02
Renoir's is realistic and features this beautiful, I would say, maybe 15-year-old girl wearing a hat. Picasso's is abstract. The face is disjointed, the nose is large, and there's maybe a hat placed on the head a little bit.

00:30:52 Speaker_02
So talking to my students about these traits and their relationship with aesthetic preferences, I like having these two images side by side to say, each of us is going to tend to gravitate towards one or the other.

00:31:06 Speaker_02
And, you know, think about what that means about yourself. You know, studies show that everybody can kind of appreciate a depiction of reality that looks realish, you know, we all like that.

00:31:19 Speaker_02
Where the real distinction comes is when you look at the predictors of who likes and who dislikes abstract art.

00:31:27 Speaker_02
And that's where these personality traits really play a role, with the higher tolerance for ambiguity being more associated with appreciation for abstract art.

00:31:36 Speaker_02
And some of this work suggests that this is something that's explained by both need for cognition and this tolerance for ambiguity as well.

00:31:47 Speaker_06
I'm wondering how you yourself see those two paintings. Tell me how you feel about them.

00:31:51 Speaker_02
I really don't like the Picasso painting. I really don't. And I recently was in New York with my son. We went to MoMA and we were all excited because we're like, oh wow, these are original Picassos.

00:32:05 Speaker_02
And you know, there's one that's really big and all the women have fat hands and weird feet and triangle faces. And I gotta tell ya, I gotta tell ya, I just don't get it. And that probably makes me not sophisticated

00:32:21 Speaker_03
I don't know, but man, I just don't get it.

00:32:28 Speaker_06
In some ways, I'm hearing your exasperation here, Dana.

00:32:32 Speaker_02
Well, kind of because I'm like, you know, I think when I was like 10, I could probably have painted that. And I know, I know that's not true. I know he's a genius, blah, blah, blah.

00:32:43 Speaker_03
But yeah, I really do not enjoy it.

00:32:50 Speaker_06
The same thing happens with literature. What was your reaction to that ambiguous ending to the story of the Lady and the Tiger? When the world is uncertain or hard to understand, this can be deeply unsatisfying for some.

00:33:04 Speaker_06
Others might find it curious, mysterious, and enticing. When we come back, how these traits shape our deepest beliefs and cause conflicts between people, and how we can bridge those divides. You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedanta.

00:33:31 Speaker_05
This is Hidden Brain.

00:33:32 Speaker_06
I'm Shankar Vedanta. We all view the world differently. Some of us see it as unpredictable and dangerous. Others see possibilities and room for exploration.

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Dana Young is the author of Wrong, How Media, Politics, and Identity Drive Our Appetite for Misinformation. She says much of the way we view the world comes down to how we tolerate uncertainty.

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Some of us are more okay than others with ambiguity, unpredictability, and randomness. How we respond to life's gray areas informs everything from our career choices to our preferences in art and literature.

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It can also influence our political beliefs. Dana, we like to think our politics are informed by logic and values and traditions, but even these beliefs might be shaped by our capacity to deal with uncertainty.

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Let's go back to one of those traits that influence how we deal with uncertainty. This is the need for cognition. Some of us enjoy thinking and complexity more than others do. How does this trait correlate with our political beliefs?

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There is some wonderful work from political psychology that looks at the trait need for cognition. So for example, there's some work by Michael Sargent from 2004 that showed that for people who are highest in need for cognition,

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they tended to be the least supportive of highly punitive measures in response to criminals or in the context of crime. And in a subsequent study trying to understand what explained that, it was that people higher in need for cognition

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were probably more motivated to consider more complex ways of attributing responsibility for why individuals would have engaged in these criminal acts in the first place.

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So a high need for cognition allows people to think beyond simple causal mechanisms of bad person does bad thing. and to think perhaps more systemically about other factors that may have been responsible for that criminal act in the first place.

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There are many examples of studies looking at similar kinds of things that show need for cognition has this kind of influence on politically relevant or even politically central belief systems.

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When you step back and look at the overall body of research, what does it reveal about the differences between liberals and conservatives when it comes to this idea of a need for cognition?

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I think about this in terms of how people monitor for threats in their environment. And when I think about it that way, it actually gives me sort of a unifying narrative that helps explain a lot of what's going on.

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I think that based on what we know now, it seems that individuals are born, perhaps genetically predisposed, to have physiological systems that deal with threat in their environment.

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and that shapes physiological patterns, which then shape psychological tendencies. And for people who are high-threat monitors, they are all about survival in the face of threat, and it's on their mind all the time.

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What serves these people best is making decisions quickly and efficiently based on heuristics, emotions, intuition, and shortcuts. That is what causes them to have this lower need for cognition,

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It's not that they can't, it's that it doesn't make sense for them based on their sort of psychophysiological predispositions.

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Similarly, these are folks who, because they're monitoring for threat, of course they're going to want to be in situations that are highly certain, ordered, predictable.

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They're not going to be very high in tolerance for ambiguity because that exposes them to threat.

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Hmm.

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And again, if you were to think about, you know, the stereotypical example of being under threat, you know, there's, I don't know, an active shooter in the vicinity or you're in a jungle somewhere and there might be a, you know, a tiger hiding in the bushes.

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You know, that's not the time when you want to spend a lot of time thinking

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through your options and thinking through what might be causing it or thinking about the systemic reasons the tiger might want to eat you, that in fact is a time for decisive action.

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And what you're saying is that some people in some ways are quicker to move into the mind state of being the person walking in the forest and hearing a twig crack behind them.

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Absolutely right. And this is why, and remember, I'm a college professor. I have been one for 17 years. I'm also a comedian. I've been one for 30 years. Do you know who I wouldn't want with me in the jungle?

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I wouldn't want a faculty colleague or a fellow comedian.

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You don't want someone saying yes and?

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I really don't. I don't. Because you know what's going to happen? I'm going to be shot and eaten by a tiger.

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So you've conducted a study, Dana, that looks at how our psychological traits might inform our opinions on transgender issues. Tell me about this work and what you found.

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So with my colleagues at the University of Delaware, We looked at, in a survey, we looked at whether or not individuals who had higher or lower need for closure had different levels of support for transgender individuals.

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What we found is that even accounting for all these other things, need for closure is associated with more negative opinions of transgender people, transgender candidates, and transgender rights.

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And this is one of those things that is intuitive on its face.

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And when we thought about studying this construct, I just thought, you know, for folks who need for there to be a yes or no answer, black and white, it would make sense for these folks, the concept of gender fluidity,

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or the concept of gender being a social construct that I could imagine that that might be hard for them to reconcile. And sure enough, our results actually showed quite a robust effect of need for closure on these outcomes.

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Dana, we talked earlier about how Stephen Colbert gave you some advice that changed your life. Many years ago, Colbert had a show on Comedy Central where he played a character of sorts.

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I want to play you a clip from the show, which was called The Colbert Rapport.

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I just want to say that I am not a racist. I don't even see race, not even my own. People tell me I'm white and I believe them because I just devoted six minutes to explaining how I'm not a racist.

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So it's clear, Dana, that Colbert isn't being serious, but can you talk about the kind of humor that he is putting on display?

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It is quintessential ironic satire. Irony is a kind of humor that is created through an inversion of meaning. And so what Stephen Colbert does is he says the opposite of what he means.

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The valence is actually the opposite of what he intends for us to take away.

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So there have been studies that examine what happens in the brain when people are processing texts like this, where it requires the listener to understand the intent of the message sender and to reconcile that intent with the literal words that are being stated.

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And it turns out that it's actually quite complex cognitively. I think about it as kind of mental gymnastics because you're thinking about intent, you're reading literal words,

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You're thinking about whether or not those match with what you know about the message sender. You're bringing old information to bear on the text.

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Turns out that for people who are really high in need for cognition, this is a kind of riddle solving that's quite enjoyable.

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But for people lower in need for cognition, this kind of irony, this kind of ambiguity in a text is very challenging and not that enjoyable.

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I want to compare that Stephen Colbert clip with a clip from the late conservative media host, Rush Limbaugh. Here he is.

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I'm sick and tired of being afraid of these people. I'm sick and tired of people acting intimidated by Democrats. This fear of being called a racist. Everybody's racist. They can't talk about anybody now without labeling them racist.

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So I'm hearing a very different tone in this clip, Dana.

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Very different tone. And this is why I refer, I mean, my first book is called Irony and Outrage as a way of sort of shorthanding the real huge distinctions that exist between these two genres.

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Outrage isn't necessarily only on the political right, okay? But we tend to see it more on the right. The nature of outrage is it identifies threats in our environment. It highlights them in an emotional and dramatic way.

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It does so didactically, very clearly, usually using some kind of hyperbole or slippery slope language that is, I would say, not just emotional, but like supercharged. It is highly activating.

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And in some ways, this brings us to a very interesting conclusion. If you look out over the media landscape of political commentary, liberal shows tend to have a very different feel to them than conservative shows.

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Correct. The liberal quote-unquote outrage shows are actually not nearly as outrageous. as the conservative outrage shows that you would see on Fox in terms of their use of, again, being emotional, hyperbolic, identifying threats, et cetera.

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And part of my struggle was trying to understand why we don't see a lot of conservative satire. Why do we not see a lot of conservative satire?

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And that's what got me thinking about all of these traits that I had been fascinated by and how they might be related here. And I think that that is really what's at the heart of the matter.

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These traits of tolerance for ambiguity and need for cognition, they do cluster on the social and cultural left, and their opposites do cluster on the social and cultural right. And so to the extent that the people who are making these shows

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are of those ideological groups, and to the extent that they're trying to activate and appeal to audiences who are also of those ideological groups, then naturally we're going to see these traits sort of manifest in the kinds of content that they create.

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You have Fox News very much in the spirit of Limbaugh with their opinion hosts really appealing to people who are driven by a need for closure, threat monitoring, and who are really just seeking to know, who do I need to be worried about and angry at, and what do I need to do?

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One thing that strikes me, though, Dana, is that because we're not seeing how our tolerance for uncertainty might be shaping how we think, you know, we find ourselves constantly at odds with other people and bewildered by their choices.

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We don't say, you know, OK, she has a higher need for cognition and therefore wants to understand the contexts that lead to crime. You know, we say she must be a snowflaker. We don't we don't say he has a more

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acute sense of threat and wants to keep our community safe, we say, you know, he's a gun-toting extremist.

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So in some ways we simplify the world without realizing that in some ways our perceptions of the world are shaped by these underlying psychological traits.

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And part of the reason that that has happened is because the way that our media environment capitalizes on these mega political identities as shortcuts that can activate us and outrage us and get us to pay attention so that they can sell us things or they can get us to vote a certain way.

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You know, this is part of this machinery that I call the identity distillation machinery of our current media environment.

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And I think, of course, what we're getting at here, Dana, is that there are excellent reasons to be decisive, and also excellent reasons to think about all the details.

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There's an advantage to coming up with explanations for things, and advantages to sitting with ambiguity.

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The fact that we have these different systems in our minds testifies to the fact that the world throws lots of different kinds of problems at us, and we would be wise to recognize that different problems probably have different solutions.

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and that we can tap into those different tendencies within us, depending upon what the situation is.

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From my vantage point, I also think about it at the system level, where a society that only has people who are tolerant of ambiguity and high in need for cognition, well, it might be a society that has art and music and innovation, but it might also be a society that could be attacked and taken over very quickly.

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right?

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A society that only has high need for closure and low need for cognition, that is a society that might be super safe, super high in law and order, but might not have the kind of innovations and exploration, art and culture that would make quality of life really rich.

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So, you know, thinking about these two things as the yin and the yang of society, rather than things that need to be demonized if they don't share with how we live our lives, I think is necessary.

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Dana Goldthwait-Young studies the media, public opinion, and political satire at the University of Delaware.

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She's the author of Wrong, How Media, Politics, and Identity Drive Our Appetite for Misinformation, and Irony and Outrage, the Polarized Landscape of Rage, Fear, and Laughter in the United States.

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Dana, thank you so much for joining me today on Hidden Brain.

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Thanks so much for having me on.

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If there's someone in your life who you think would be interested in the ideas we explored today, especially if that person is of a different worldview than yourself, we'd love for you to share this episode with them.

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Maybe use these ideas as an opportunity for deeper conversation, an opportunity to go beyond headlines and hot-button issues and understand the underlying drivers of their beliefs. If you do engage in such conversations, let us know how they go.

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You can also send us follow-up questions for Danigal Young. To do so, please find a quiet room, record a voice memo on your phone, and email it to us at ideas at hiddenbrain.org. That email address again is ideas at hiddenbrain.org.

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60 seconds is plenty. Please use the subject line, uncertainty. Please also be sure to pronounce your name and let us know if we have permission to use your recording in a future episode of the show. Hidden Brain is produced by Hidden Brain Media.

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Our audio production team includes Annie Murphy-Paul, Kristen Wong, Laura Querell, Ryan Katz, Autumn Barnes, Andrew Chadwick, and Nick Woodbury. Tara Boyle is our executive producer. I'm Hidden Brain's executive editor.

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