Moments of confusion can be pretty memorable, and not in a good way. How is this thing supposed to work? What is the teacher’s point? Where am I, and how do I get to where I am going? But confusion is greatly underrated, argues the journalist Jamie Holmes in his new book, “Nonsense.” Naturally, it is good to understand. Yet, Holmes writes, our discomfort with not knowing can lead us astray — to bad solutions, or to brilliant options never spotted. If we could learn to embrace uncertainty, we’d all be better off — and better prepared for modern life. Holmes answered questions from Mind Matters editor Gareth Cook.
Cook: How did you become interested in this unusual topic?
Holmes: My childhood was full of jarring experiences—jarring in a good way—that felt at once bizarre, confusing, challenging, and enlightening. The social world of the south side of Chicago, where I started high school, was much more diverse than the one in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where I finished high school. My father threw me into a German school in Berlin, with two weeks of language lessons, when I was eleven. I went to high school in Budapest for a bit when I was 15. I taught high school classes in Romania after college. So I think one puzzle that I’ve always found really intriguing is how someone’s worldview changes when it’s challenged by radically unusual experiences, and how difficult and rewarding those time periods can be. The psychologist Dean Simonton calls them “diversifying experiences.” So, in a sense, one major theme of the book—what happens when beliefs collide with unexpected or unclear situations—is very personal to me.
More directly, I was looking into the psychologist Roy Baumeister’s research on willpower, which got me interested, more broadly, in how the mind handles mental conflicts. That led to me to the work of psychologist Arie Kruglanksi, and in particular a book called “The Psychology of Closed Mindedness.” And I realized very quickly that here was this rich vein of research on ambiguity and uncertainty from a highly-respected researcher, published in top journals, that had received almost no popular attention simply because Kruglanski hadn’t gotten around to writing a popular book about it. He joked to me that now he wouldn’t have to.
Cook: You write about our “need for closure.” Where does this come from, and why is it something that we should know about ourselves?
Holmes: Our need for closure is our natural preference for definite answers over confusion and ambiguity. The need-for-closure scale was developed by Kruglanski in the early 1990s, although forerunners of the concept appeared after World War II as psychologists struggled to understand Nazism. Every person has their own baseline level of need for closure. (Curious readers can test theirs, by the way, at my website.) It likely evolved via natural selection. If we didn’t have some capacity to shut down thinking, we’d deliberate forever. There must be some mechanism pushing us toward resolution, Kruglanski saw. We have to eliminate ambiguity.
What I find really fascinating is how our need for closure is affected by the situation we’re in. So, our need for closure rises when we have to act rather than just observe, and when we’re rushed, or bored, or tired. Any stress, really, can make our discomfort with ambiguity increase. And that matters, because a high need for closure negatively influences some of our most critical decisions: how we deal with perceived threats, who we decide to trust, whether we admit we’re wrong, whether we stereotype, and even how creative we are. So much of the book focuses on the dangers of a high need for closure, strategies for lowering it, and ways to learn from ambiguity rather than dismiss it.
by Gareth Cook , Scientific American | Read more:
Image: Nina Subin
Cook: How did you become interested in this unusual topic? Holmes: My childhood was full of jarring experiences—jarring in a good way—that felt at once bizarre, confusing, challenging, and enlightening. The social world of the south side of Chicago, where I started high school, was much more diverse than the one in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where I finished high school. My father threw me into a German school in Berlin, with two weeks of language lessons, when I was eleven. I went to high school in Budapest for a bit when I was 15. I taught high school classes in Romania after college. So I think one puzzle that I’ve always found really intriguing is how someone’s worldview changes when it’s challenged by radically unusual experiences, and how difficult and rewarding those time periods can be. The psychologist Dean Simonton calls them “diversifying experiences.” So, in a sense, one major theme of the book—what happens when beliefs collide with unexpected or unclear situations—is very personal to me.
More directly, I was looking into the psychologist Roy Baumeister’s research on willpower, which got me interested, more broadly, in how the mind handles mental conflicts. That led to me to the work of psychologist Arie Kruglanksi, and in particular a book called “The Psychology of Closed Mindedness.” And I realized very quickly that here was this rich vein of research on ambiguity and uncertainty from a highly-respected researcher, published in top journals, that had received almost no popular attention simply because Kruglanski hadn’t gotten around to writing a popular book about it. He joked to me that now he wouldn’t have to.
Cook: You write about our “need for closure.” Where does this come from, and why is it something that we should know about ourselves?
Holmes: Our need for closure is our natural preference for definite answers over confusion and ambiguity. The need-for-closure scale was developed by Kruglanski in the early 1990s, although forerunners of the concept appeared after World War II as psychologists struggled to understand Nazism. Every person has their own baseline level of need for closure. (Curious readers can test theirs, by the way, at my website.) It likely evolved via natural selection. If we didn’t have some capacity to shut down thinking, we’d deliberate forever. There must be some mechanism pushing us toward resolution, Kruglanski saw. We have to eliminate ambiguity.
What I find really fascinating is how our need for closure is affected by the situation we’re in. So, our need for closure rises when we have to act rather than just observe, and when we’re rushed, or bored, or tired. Any stress, really, can make our discomfort with ambiguity increase. And that matters, because a high need for closure negatively influences some of our most critical decisions: how we deal with perceived threats, who we decide to trust, whether we admit we’re wrong, whether we stereotype, and even how creative we are. So much of the book focuses on the dangers of a high need for closure, strategies for lowering it, and ways to learn from ambiguity rather than dismiss it.
by Gareth Cook , Scientific American | Read more:
Image: Nina Subin
