PsychMyths

Your Brain Hates Uncertainty - It's an Uncertainty Reduction Machine

Brains want to reduce information load by reducing uncertainty.

Uncertainty is the confidence you have that you have, for example, made the right decision. Why is that?

Think about a zebra in the wild. Uncertainty, with many animals, including humans tends to cause the animal to freeze, because it doesn't know what to do.

When one doesn't know what to do, the default state is to do nothing. Is that a tiger I smell? Or is it a mouse? Not sure. On the one hand....but well, on the other hand... You see the problem. Certainty prevents inaction, and inaction often results in the death of the animal (unless it's part of becoming invisible by ceasing motion.

There's another reason, though and that's because the greater the uncertainty, the more the brain has to focus on the stimuli or continue to process information about the situation -- focusing attention. Brains don't like that.

Can You Relate to The Uncertainty Issue?

Sure you can. Think about a decision that you have made in the past that has been very important to you. Let's say whether to marry a particular person. The uncertainty of the pro's and con's can drive you around the bend, and in fact it's uncertainty that causes stress and physical manifestations of stress that affect one's health.

Remember how it felt? In addition to the stress, you might have said: "I don't know what to do, I'm stuck". In fact that's exactly what happens. You get stuck. You can't move one way (marry) or the other, so you don't do anything. That, of course IS a decision of a sort, since if you do nothing, you won't get married.

Procrastination is often a result of overwhelming uncertainty on the part of a brain that seeks to reduce certainty.

Remember what it felt like when you made a decision, finally? Relief, provided you could let go, and not continue to revisit your decision.

When you decide, you tend to reduce uncertainty, which feels good. That sparked one of my former colleagues (a Psychologist) to quip: "If you can't decide, flip a coin. By the time it comes down, you'll probably know what you want to do anyway, and if you don't, that's ok, because sometimes any decision is better than no decision at all"

Implications For Making Errors

You brain keeps saying "Make a decision, Bozo" by making you feel uncomfortable, anxious and stressed, and to be honest it doesn't really care which decision you make. It wants the "thing" off the table, so it can attend to other things.

Therein lies the problem. There's a biological urge to reduce uncertainty, And limitations on how much information you can collect, collate and interpret, an use to reduce that uncertainty.

The result is you say: "Oh the hell with it, and you choose a position, or an action, or formulate a belief that is based on partial information. YOU decide how much information is "enough" And your "enough" will never be enough to be completely right.

Of course, I'm generalizing here, which is actually a case in point. If I was to be able to state all the exceptions and conditions for everything in this series, we'd be here for twenty years, be bored out of our minds, and YOU couldn't take it all in even if I could explain it (which I can't).

The brain's preference for reducing uncertainty, coupled with being a limited information processing machine means you make mistakes. The more complex something is, the more "wrong" you will be.

A rush to judgment to use a common phrase.

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