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Brains prefer bad news to suspense
The open loop
The brain hates an open loop. It craves completion, so waiting on test results, an interview callback, a definition of the relationship, or an apology is exhausting. Faced with the silence, it invents explanations, and the explanations are rarely generous. A quiet hiring manager becomes a verdict that someone wasn't good enough, though the manager may simply be interviewing several candidates. A friend who hasn't replied becomes proof of having done something wrong, though the friend may have had a hard week.
Bad news over suspense
For people with this intolerance, the nervous system would almost rather receive bad news than remain in suspense. The reasoning runs that once the outcome is known, relaxing becomes possible. Unanswered questions become breeding grounds for catastrophic thinking.
The search for certainty
The search for certainty rarely delivers that peace. A frightening current event leads to an article, then another article, then a forum, then a video, until two hours have gone into investigating a future that doesn't exist.
Is not knowing worse than a sure shock?
In a 2016 study led by Archy de Berker at University College London, published in Nature Communications, volunteers played a game in which they could receive painful electric shocks. Stress, measured by pupil dilation, skin conductance, and self-report, peaked when the odds of a shock were even and fell when the outcome was more certain either way. The result suggests that unpredictability itself produces stress, separate from the pain. The game used a 50 percent chance as its point of maximum unpredictability.
Where did intolerance of uncertainty research start?
Researchers at Universite Laval in Quebec developed the idea in the 1990s while studying chronic worry. A questionnaire called the Intolerance of Uncertainty Scale, published in 1994 by Mark Freeston and colleagues, became the standard way to measure it. Later work by Michel Dugas, Robert Ladouceur, and others tied high scores to worry in generalized anxiety disorder.
Why do open loops nag at the mind?
In the 1920s, Bluma Zeigarnik, a student of Kurt Lewin in Berlin, reported that people remembered interrupted tasks better than completed ones. The pattern became known as the Zeigarnik effect. Lewin's theory held that an unfinished task leaves a tension that lasts until the task is resolved. Replications have been mixed, with the memory advantage appearing in some studies and not in others.
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