Fear and uncertainty in the face of death: The role of life after death in group identification

Terror management theory argues that mortality‐induced terror motivates group identification. Uncertainty–identity theory argues that uncertainty about what happens after death motivates group identification. Two experiments were conducted to test the latter reasoning. In Experiment 1 (n = 187), mortality salience was manipulated, and uncertainty about the afterlife was measured to predict national identification. As hypothesized, mortality salience strengthened identification only among those who were uncertain about the afterlife. In Experiment 2 (n = 177), mortality salience was manipulated as before, but belief in an afterlife was also manipulated—participants were primed to believe that there was an afterlife, there was not an afterlife, or the existence of an afterlife was uncertain. As in Experiment 1, mortality salience strengthened identification only among those who were existentially uncertain. These experiments show that uncertainty plays a significant role in reactions to mortality salience, and support uncertainty–identity theory's analysis of the role of self‐uncertainty in ideological conviction and group behavior. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Uncertainty Avoidance Influences Choices for Potential Gains but not Losses

Uncertainty of outcomes is a primary dimension underlying human judgment and decision making, and is a defining feature of risk. Even though uncertainty almost always exists in decision making contexts, individuals and cultures vary in their preference for avoiding uncertainty. This study examines how uncertainty avoidance influences judgments involving uncertain and risky alternatives. Participants were presented with problems that involve potential gains or losses and contain options reflecting uncertain or certain outcomes. Greater uncertainty avoidance predicted choices for uncertain outcomes that involved gains, which tend to promote risk aversion, but not for uncertain outcomes that led to losses, which tend to promote risk seeking. These results demonstrate that culturally-relevant dispositions such as uncertain avoidance can have complex effects on judgment.     

Subjectivity uncertainty theory of objectification: Compensating for uncertainty about how to positively relate to others by downplaying their subjective attributes

Why do people sometimes view others as objects rather than complete persons? We propose that when people desire successful interactions with others, yet feel uncertain about their ability to navigate others' subjectivity, they downplay others' subjective attributes, focusing instead on their concrete attributes. This account suggests that objectification represents a response to uncertainty about one's ability to successfully interact with others distinct from: instrumentalizing others in response to power; dehumanizing others in response to threat; and simplifying others in response to general uncertainty. Supporting this account: When uncertainty about navigating women's subjectivity was salient, men showed increased sexual objectification to the extent that they desired successful interactions with women (Study 1) and were primed to view such interactions as self-esteem relevant (Study 2). In a workplace scenario, participants made uncertain about their managerial ability felt less confident about their ability to navigate employees' subjectivity and, consequently, role-objectified employees (Study 3).     

Religious Zeal and the Uncertain Self

In two studies, personal uncertainty threats caused compensatory religious zeal. In Study 1 an academic uncertainty manipulation heightened conviction for religious beliefs and support for religious warfare. In Study 2 a relationship uncertainty manipulation caused non-Muslim's to derogate Islam. Together, these findings demonstrate that two aspects of religious zeal—conviction for one's own beliefs and derogation of others'—are caused by personal uncertainty.     

Making Sense of Life: The Existential Self Trying to Deal with Personal Uncertainty

This article is about how people make sense of life and focuses on one core threat that may play a pivotal role in people's lives as existential meaning makers: personal uncertainty. Personal uncertainty is defined as the aversive feeling that you experience when you feel uncertain about yourself. Drawing on an uncertainty management perspective, it is hypothesized that cultural worldviews may provide a means to cope with personal uncertainty and that this may explain why under conditions of personal uncertainty people may respond especially positively to events that bolster their cultural norms and values and particularly negatively to persons and events that violate these norms and values. Findings are reviewed that support the uncertainty management model's predictions. Furthermore, the uncertainty management model may explain why terror management theory is not always about terror, but (at least partly) about personal uncertainty. Finally, conceptual implications, conflicting findings, and loose ends are noted, and testable hypotheses are formulated, which may further insight into the psychological processes pertaining to sense-making, worldview defense, and self-regulation.     

‘We Pray by His Mouth’: Karl Barth,Erving Goffman,and a Theology of Invocation

Rereading the opening question of the Westminster Catechism, “What is the chief end of man?”, I contend in this essay that the act of invocation — giving God thanks, praise, and petitions — is the act in and through which human being itself is founded, constituted and achieved. I take important cues from Karl Barth's Church Dogmatics and The Christian Life, and from sociologist Erving Goffman's work on the shifting “footings” involved in everyday interactions. I argue for an account of the human being as a being‐with‐God, human acting as acting‐with‐God, and human salvation as a restoration to the genuine human partner's work — indeed, the true leitourgia— of thanks, praise and petition to God.     

Favourable and unfavourable conditions for children's confidence judgments

Two studies are presented in which favourable and unfavourable conditions for children's meta‐cognitive monitoring processes are examined. Previously reported findings have shown that especially children's uncertainty monitoring (in contrast to certainty monitoring) poses specific problems for children in their elementary school years. When interviewing children about an observed event, answerable and unanswerable questions in two question formats (unbiased and misleading) were used, and 8‐ and 10‐year‐old children as well as adults were asked to rate their confidence on a three‐point scale concerning each response. Results of Study 1 show that accuracy instructions and the option to answer with ‘I don't know’ inflate children's level of confidence because uncertain answers are withheld. Results of Study 2 revealed that children's difficulty with uncertainty monitoring may lie in a cognitive overload during the interview because immediate confidence judgments were less precise and less adequate compared with delayed confidence judgments. Participants' rating of their uncertainty after having erroneously provided an answer to an unanswerable question proved that children aged 8 years and older are able to experience and report levels of uncertainty but, as was shown for answerable questions, these emerging competencies are dependent on favourable task conditions.     

Managing Self-Uncertainty Through Group Identification

Hogg's uncertainty-identity theory (UIT) is briefly described to identify similarities and differences to Van den Bos's uncertainty management model (UMM). Against a background of significant overlap in scope, mission and concepts, four differences are identified: First, UMM is primarily a theory of motivation for ideological conviction; UIT is a theory of motivation for group identification. Second, UMM talks about personal uncertainty; UIT talks about self-uncertainty—the implications of this difference in terminology are discussed. Third, both theories focus on uncertainty about self; but UIT also focuses on an array of moderating variables that affect the experience of uncertainty and the way in which self-uncertainty is reduced. Finally, and most significantly, UMM does not detail the process of uncertainty reduction; UIT does—it specifies social cognitive processes that reduce self-uncertainty and contexts that direct these processes toward “normal” group phenomena or toward more extreme group phenomena.     

The diversity paradox: when people who value diversity surround themselves with like‐minded others

An anomaly exists between society's push for diversity and people's preference to be with like‐minded others—a diversity paradox. Research suggests it is endemic to group life to accentuate similarity within groups and maximize differences between groups. Drawing on uncertainty–identity theory, that uncertainty motivates identification with clearly defined groups, we explore whether increasing community identification to alleviate self‐uncertainty is impacted when diversity is important. In a naturalistic experiment, values match and placing importance on diversity each predicted community identification. Uncertainty decreased identification when diversity was important. Greater identification emerged when diversity and value similarity were important. This effect, strong under low uncertainty, did not emerge under high uncertainty. Findings are discussed in terms of the antagonism between society's push for diversity and research on the psychology of groups.     

Timing Problems: When Care and Violence Converge in Stephen King's Horror Novel Christine

Judith Butler, Joan Tronto, and Stephen King all hinge human experience on shared ontological vulnerability, but whereas Butler and Tronto use vulnerability to build ethical commitments, King exploits aging, disability, and death to frighten us. King's horror genre is provocative for the imaginative landscape of feminist theory precisely because he uses vulnerability to magnify the anxieties of mass culture. In Christine, the characters' shared susceptibility to psychic and physical injury blurs the boundary between care and violence. Like Butler, King depicts our social worlds encrusted with normative violence: the mundane ways that norms police gender, race, class, and disability identities. And like Butler, King makes undecidability a key feature of human identity: the idea that needs and identities are uncertain. Normative violence and undecidability trouble the starting point of Tronto's care theory—attentiveness to needs—because both concepts invest interdependency with ambiguity and conflict. But like Tronto, King recognizes that care‐actors must act, even amid ambiguity and even when their actions make care and aggression converge. Christine's supernatural plot details the psychic possession of an American teenager, but the novel's more terrifying story is about interdependency and how normative violence is not the antithesis of care, but its dark underbelly.     

Are you sure? the role of uncertainty in career

Although uncertainty is a fundamental human experience, professionals in the career field have largely overlooked the role that it plays in people's careers. The changed nature of careers has resulted in people experiencing increased uncertainty in their career that is beyond the uncertainty experienced in their job. The author explores the role of uncertainty in people's experience of their careers and examines the implications for career counseling theory and practice. A review of the career theory and career counseling literature indicates that although contemporary approaches have been offered to respond to the changed nature of career, none of the approaches have identified uncertainty as a core part of individuals' experience of their career. The broader literature on uncertainty is then reviewed at the societal, organizational, and individual levels.     

Back to the future: Temporal perspective in the explanation of events

Prospective hindsight involves generating an explanation for a future event as if it had already happened; i.e., one goes forward in time, and then looks back. In order to examine how shifts in perspective might influence people's perceptions of events, we investigated two possible factors: temporal perspective (whether an event is set in the future or past) and uncertainty (whether the event's occurrence is certain or uncertain). In the first experiment, temporal perspective showed little influence while outcome uncertainty strongly affected the nature of explanations for events. Explanations for sure events tended to be longer, to contain a higher proportion of episodic reasons, and to be expressed in past tense. Evidence from the second experiment supports the view that uncertainty mediates not the amount of time spent explaining, but rather subjects' choice of explanation type. The implications of these findings for the use of temporal perspective in decision aiding are discussed.     

ANALYTIC MIND USE AND INTERPSYCHIC COMMUNICATION: DRIVING FORCE IN ANALYTIC TECHNIQUE,PATHWAY TO UNCONSCIOUS MENTAL LIFE

Developed from established psychoanalytic knowledge among different psychoanalytic cultures concerning unconscious interpsychic communication, analysts' use of their receptive mental experience—their analytic mind use, including the somatic, unconscious, and less accessible derivatives—represents a significant investigative road to patients' unconscious mental life, particularly with poorly symbolized mental states. The author expands upon this tradition, exploring what happens when patients unconsciously experience and identify with the analyst's psychic functioning. The technical implications of the analyst's “instrument” are described, including the analyst's ego regression, creation of inner space, taking mind as object, bearing uncertainty and intense affect, and self‐analysis. Brief case vignettes illustrate the structure and obstacles to this work.     

Decision deadlines and uncertainty monitoring: the effect of time constraints on uncertainty and perceptual responses

The behavioral uncertainty response has grounded the study of animal metacognition and influenced the study of human psychophysics. However, the interpretation of this response is debated—especially whether it is a behavioral index of metacognition. The authors advanced this interpretation using the dissociative technique of response deadlines. Uncertainty responding, if it is higher level or metacognitive, should depend on a slower, more controlled decisional process and be more vulnerable to time constraints. Humans performed sparse–uncertain–dense or sparse–middle–dense discriminations in which, respectively, they could decline difficult trials or positively identify middle stimuli. Uncertainty responses were sharply and selectively reduced under a decision deadline, as compared to primary perceptual responses (i.e., “sparse,” “middle,” and “dense” responses). This dissociation suggests that the uncertainty response does reflect a higher-level, decisional response. It grants the uncertainty response a distinctive psychological role in its task and encourages an interpretation of this response as an elemental behavioral index of uncertainty that deserves continuing research.     

How to Husserl a Quine — And a Heidegger,too

Is consciousness or the subject part of the natural world or the human world? Can we write intentionality, so central in Husserl's philosophy, into Quine's system of ontological naturalism and naturalized epistemology — or into Heidegger's account of human being and existential phenomenology? The present task is to show how to do so. Anomalous monism provides a key.     

Children's Understanding of Scientific Inquiry: Their Conceptualization of Uncertainty in Investigations of Their Own Design

The study examined children's understanding of scientific inquiry, through the lens of their conceptualization of uncertainty in investigations they had designed and implemented with a partner. These largely student-regulated investigations followed a unit about animal behavior that emphasized the scaffolding of independent inquiry. Participants were children in a 2nd grade class (n = 21) and a combined 4th-5th grade class (n = 31). The primary database consisted of videotaped structured interviews with each pair following completion of their investigation. These interviews were used to analyze whether the child had conceptualized an uncertainty in their study and, if so, the sphere of the uncertainty. This top-level analysis resulted in a taxonomy of 5 spheres of uncertainty: (a) how to produce the desired outcome as uncertain; (b) data as uncertain; (c) trend identified in the data as uncertain; (d) generalizability of this trend as uncertain; and (e) the theory that best accounts for the trend as uncertain. Seventy-one percent of the 2nd graders and 87% of the 4th-5th graders conceptualized 1 or more spheres of uncertainty in their respective research study. Among those who had conceptualized 1 or more spheres of uncertainty, 80% of the 2nd graders and 97% of the 4th-5th graders posited a strategy for how to modify their study to address the uncertainty. Finer grained analysis revealed that in almost every instance the grounds reflected some valid concern and the strategy the child proposed would at least begin to address the identified problem. These analyses indicate that most children developed a rich understanding of how uncertainty enters into scientific inquiry. In this context of reflection on their own scientific inquiry, these children manifested at least a rudimentary understanding of the complex relation between the natural world and knowledge thereof that transcended a naive realism, and manifested aspects of a "knowledge problematic" epistemological perspective.     

Disney and fundamentalism: The fetishisation of the family and the production of American family values

The propensity to sanitise and order violence, uncertainty, political conflict, and difference is one of the trademarks of Disney ‘innocence’, an innocence felt to be appropriate for children to consume. The Disney focus and delineation of a particular kind of family—which Disney locates far back in the recesses of a human biological history—is used in order to support what has come to be known as ‘American family values’. This same model of the family is evinced in those religions that have been termed fundamentalist. This paper will examine and compare the fetishisation of the family found in Disney's animated productions (productions intended to be consumed by, and to consume, children) and fundamentalism. I hope to establish a reading of the texts that demonstrates what is at stake for the propagators of this mythic model of the family, and what is at stake for those who consume such a model.     

Uncertainty-dependent activity within the ventral striatum predicts task-related changes in response strategy

Recent neuroimaging work has demonstrated that the ventral striatum (VS) encodes confidence in perceptual decisions. However, it remains unclear whether perceptual uncertainty can signal the need to adapt behavior (such as by responding more cautiously) and whether such behavioral changes are related to uncertainty-dependent activity within the VS. Changes in response strategy have previously been observed following errors and are associated with both medial frontal cortex (MFC) and VS, two components of the performance-monitoring network. If uncertainty can elicit changes in response strategy (slowing), then one might hypothesize that these changes rely on the performance-monitoring network. In the present study, we investigated the link between perceptual uncertainty and task-related behavioral adaptations (response slowing and accuracy increases), as well as how such behavioral changes relate to uncertainty-dependent activity within MFC and VS. Our participants performed a two-choice perceptual decision-making task in which perceptual uncertainty was reported on each trial while behavioral and event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging data were collected. Analysis of the behavioral data revealed that uncertain (but correct) responses led to slowing on subsequent trials, a phenomenon that was positively correlated with increased accuracy. Critically, post-uncertainty slowing was negatively correlated with the VS activity elicited by uncertain responses. In agreement with previous reports, increases in MFC activation were observed for uncertain responses, although MFC activity was not correlated with post-uncertainty slowing. These results suggest that perceptual uncertainty can serve as a signal to adapt one’s response strategy and that such behavioral changes are closely tied to the VS, a key node in the performance-monitoring network.