Please introduce yourself.
I am a social psychologist and neuroscientist, and a lecturer at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. My doctoral degree involved brain research. I am engaged in a relatively new field, called neuromarketing: the influence of the media, and in particular the marketing media, on the brain.
When and how did you become interested in uncertainty?
Within the framework of my occupation with consumer behavior, I sometimes act as a consultant to companies and organizations. A few months before the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic, an international fashion firm asked me to sum up for it the body of knowledge about the psychology of uncertainty. Effectively, they commissioned me to perform a meta-analysis [a systematic assessment of the results of previous research], because they wanted to understand what psychology and brain research could tell them about decision-making in an environment of uncertainty. The explained to me that the world of fashion had been operating in an uncertain environment for some years, because of frequent changes in patterns of preference and buying by consumers.
And this, you say, was before the pandemic?
As fate would have it, on the day I was supposed to present the body of knowledge to them, Ben-Gurion airport was shut down because of the coronavirus. But I was already equipped with a theoretical body of knowledge about decision-making in conditions of uncertainty, and it became a tool of applied research for me.
Perhaps you can define uncertainty.
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Uncertainty is the unraveling of the connection between cause and effect. We perceive the world as being composed of long chains of causes or actions, and their results. This is not controlled, conscious or volitional. It’s the way our brain works, the underlying principle of our operating system.
In articles on the subject, I came across references to the brain as a forecasting or predicting machine.
Yes, that is actually the way we survive. At the level of evolutionary psychology, we are always supposed to be ready and set to defend ourselves, and at the purely neurological level, too, our brain is constructed of connections between nerve cells, and those connections are created in the wake of external cause-and-effect events.
To simplify greatly: The brain wants me, say, to make a connection between the roar of a lion and danger, so that the next time I hear a lion roar I’ll know that I am in danger. The mechanism of cause and effect is intended to save energy. It is learning.
The brain aspires to save energy, on the one hand, and to keep us alive, on the other hand. When I push a glass off a table and it breaks, the brain creates a connection between the pushing of the glass and the result: It broke. Learning theory works the same way. We have a stimulus such as light or shadow, and in its wake food appears – cause and effect. As people who are aware of themselves and of reality, we are able to say to ourselves that there is no real certainty, that the world is rife with uncertainty, but our brain was formed and develops by means of events of certainty. There’s a law in statistics that says that if something happens once it will not necessarily happen a second time, but if something happens a second time it will certainly happen a third time. Our brain works the same way: Once something happens a second time, it’s already worth our while to invest and create the schema by means of which we analyze the reality around us. Until now, this more or less worked for us, but now we live in a new reality, and the connection between cause and effect has become unhinged.
Everything is fluid. Even this conversation: We arranged a day and a time, then came the WhatsApp from the day camp, and I canceled our meeting and hurried to find the nearest swab. So here we are, speaking a day later, with me cloistered with a 6-year-old boy, waiting to find out what our fate will be.
That’s exactly the thing. That uncertainty event is not private. It’s collective. We are all sharing the experience.
You know, we all live with the knowledge that tomorrow a grand piano might fall on us as we walk down the street. But the uncertainty of the pandemic is of a sort that compels us to come into contact with it and cope with its consequences all the time. We know that the idea of control is an illusion – but even that illusion has been taken from us.
A COVID-19 vaccination clinic at Jerusalem’s Misgav Ladach Hospital earlier this month.
Ohad Zwigenberg
In general, we confuse certainty and control. Certainty is a fiction. That we understand well, at least cognitively. But as [the American social psychologist] Leon Festinger taught us, the human experience is also composed of the emotional and behavioral level. We actually know very well that certainty is a fiction, but we want to feel that there is such a thing, because that gives us a feeling of control. The coronavirus crisis has deprived us of that feeling. I just heard [infectious diseases expert] Prof. Galia Rahav say to [TV journalist] Ilana Dayan that the pandemic has taught physicians to be humble – it has brought humility into our lives.
Humility or thralldom?
Maybe both? We live in an era in which we are used to feeling in control. There aren’t many gray areas. There is no not-knowing. If my child asks me a question and I don’t know the answer, I spend a second looking in Google. I won’t tell him, “I don’t have a clue.” But now we simply don’t have a clue. The last time uncertainty like this prevailed, at a world level, was in World War II. It’s an overwhelming, jolting experience for the modern individual. Today it’s clearer than ever to us that the living environment we have engineered for ourselves is not serving us properly and is not adaptive to the challenges that still await us.
Why does it frighten us so much, why is it so difficult, to exist in a state of uncertainty?
Some people find it less difficult. The social psychologist Arie Kruglanski created the NFCS, the “need for closure scale” [to measure the desire for certainty]. His index is based on five factors: the ability to predict; the need for order; the ability to make decisions; cognitive flexibility or openness – which means that you are capable of observing a debate and grasping that there is not necessarily a right side and a wrong side; and lastly, the ability to reside in ambiguity. There are people who don’t respond well to situations of ambiguity.
Everyone, no?
No. One day, when I was a child, I came home crying from preschool. When my mother clarified why, it turned out that the teacher had taught us that there is sun in the morning and moon at night, and when I told her I had seen the moon and the sun together in the sky, she wasn’t willing to accept it. As children we are capable of bearing ambiguity, but as we grow older we start to persuade ourselves that in the morning there is only sun and at night only moon, and that’s how it works.
In an interview in Michael Pollan’s book about psychedelics, the developmental psychologist Alison Gopnik says that brain activity in early childhood is more like a dream or a psychedelic trip. Children are capable of being in a state of ambiguity, of ambivalence, of abstract thinking.
Right, and that is actually what Kruglanski is saying: that if we become more flexible conceptually, if we train ourselves to harbor opposites, to accept ambiguity, to flinch from black-and-white and dichotomy, we will be able to cope better with uncertainty. It’s a kind of game we play with ourselves. We tell ourselves that the world is not black-and-white, there really is no certainty, but at the moment of truth we escape immediately into black-and-white. Those thought schemas are far more natural to us, we like the fact that everything is organized in clear, labeled compartments.
One way or the other, we have been in a state of uncertainty for a long time now. And it’s stressful.
Very much so. One way to reduce that stress, by the way, is to try to liberate the brain a little from the predicting machine mode. There’s a fascinating study that involved brain scans being done on people as they listened to music. The researchers found that the brain derives pleasure from trying to guess what the next note, the next chord, will be; and the more difficult it was to predict, the more intensely the pleasure centers operated.
So there is a reward for predicting as such. Will we never be able to stop?
It’s impossible to stop. It’s like the operating system of a computer: You can’t say, No, I want it to work differently, now don’t predict. Our only option is to deliberately create experiences in the framework of which the brain will not be preoccupied with predicting. I, for example, swim. While swimming, the brain understands that the only attractions it can expect at the sensual level are the sight of the stripe on the floor of the pool, maybe the temperature of the water; so, after around five minutes it says to itself: Fine, cool it, this is all that’s going to happen here at the moment, there’s nothing to see here. When we perform a routine motor activity, which repeats itself time after time, we are effectively signaling the brain that it can relax.
Let’s talk about what’s known as “cognitive dread.”
Cognitive dread is related to the stress we experience in the face of the unknown. There was an experiment conducted in Britain, in which some participants were told that they were going to receive an electric shock, let’s say next Tuesday at 9 A.M. The second group was told that next Tuesday at 9 A.M. they might receive an electric shock – there was a 50 percent chance. The results were surprising. The group that knew it would get an electric shock on a particular day and at a particular time was far calmer with respect to all the indices – physiological, stress hormones – and also in their self-reporting. Consider how surprising that is: It was precisely the group that had a 50-percent chance of not getting an electric shock was stressed.
Customers show proof of their COVID-19 vaccinations before entering the restaurant “Martha” in Philadelphia last month.
HANNAH BEIER/ REUTERS
Why is that surprising? Hatred of uncertainty is the strongest thing there is. People prefer to stay in a job or in a relationship that makes them miserable. We will always prefer the less-good scenario over the unknown. A study that was done of women waiting for the results of a biopsy found that after they received the answer, even if it was bad, the stress level decreased. The highest level was recorded while they waited for the result.
We remain in unsuccessful relationships and jobs because we don’t know what the price of change will be. I know what price I will pay, but not the future profit. Cognitive dread surprises me, because I think that consciously or unconsciously, we do a profit-and-loss calculation about everything. If you know there is a 100-percent chance that you will get an electric shock, your loss expectancy is 100 percent. Someone who is told that they have a 50-percent chance of getting an electric shock has a loss expectancy and a profit expectancy of 50 percent, which should be a better situation, and they should be calmer. But it doesn’t work like that, because for us it’s a lot worse not knowing if something will happen.
During the last year and a half we thought we had succeeded in coming out of [the pandemic situation] twice. The first time, with the charming invitation to go out and drink beer, the second time after the vaccinations, when the exit already assumed a ritual dimension. I remember a clip of a hospital team who held a kind of party of mask removal and victory over the coronavirus. I wonder how that affected us, the fact that we returned twice to square one. Maybe it would have been easier if everything had been continuous.
From that we can learn how deep our need for cause and effect is. They are such primal patterns. We were flooded with the feeling that science triumphed, the rational world was victorious, things were working as we wanted them to, we eradicated the pandemic and we could go back to partying. Reality returned to remind us that we are not the masters, that it’s very nice that we want it to end, but it’s simply not under our control. The choice to be vaccinated was effectively a control-related statement: Look, I’m choosing, I’ve decided not to become infected, I can return to the illusion that I am in control of my life’s reality. But if the vaccination can’t guarantee me that I won’t become infected, I don’t have the ability to come up with that prediction, I go backward – and I am in worse shape. I have lost control conclusively, I don’t know what’s going to happen with me.
I think we have to revise our outlook in general. We need to understand how to educate ourselves and our children to be capable of existing in an environment of uncertainty. The bubble we lived in has burst. We are on the brink of a period of uncertainty whose duration simply cannot be estimated – not only because of the coronavirus but also because of the changes in the climate, which could lead to economic and geopolitical transformations. The uncertainty, at the global level, will only intensify.
We should talk, in this context, about the connection between uncertainty and anxiety.
The dissolution of that equation, of cause and effect, forgoing the notion that we are in control of the situation, leads naturally to anxiety.
Perhaps our resources are simply not adapted to bear a prolonged situation of uncertainty. Maybe they are meant for specific episodes or situations of uncertainty.
Right. What is happening to us now is a type of prolonged trauma. I once heard a neuroscientist – unfortunately, I can’t remember her name – say in a lecture that the cerebral mechanism of “fight or flight” is intended to protect us from the bear in the forest. But what happens if the frightening bear doesn’t live in the forest, but comes home from work with us every day? The impact of a trauma of that kind, a protracted trauma, on the brain is tremendous at every level. Being in a situation of uncertainty for a long period also has a cerebral effect at the physiological level. There’s the famous experiment about learned helplessness – about the animal that is given electric shocks with no connection to its behavior, and in the end simply surrenders. I think that to a large degree we are now living in [a state of] learned helplessness. We feel that whether we go to the wedding or pass up on the restaurant makes no difference – it [the coronavirus] will come knocking on our door.
When we don’t know what to expect, we usually choose the worst-case scenario.
True, but that actually helps us cope. As part of my uncertainty project, I visited the air force’s flight-test center. These are people who take planes to a high altitude, turn off the engine and start to dive. When I spoke to them about fear, they said that they are constantly trained to think about the worst-case scenario. What will happen if you fall from this and this altitude – write down the 10 things you need to do. To prepare ourselves for the worst situation, to imagine what we would do if something terrible were to happen to us, what will happen when we become infected, when we fall ill – that helps.
Maybe we’ll conclude on a less gloomy note?
I have two encouraging things to contribute. First of all, uncertainty also carries great potential that we don’t take advantage of. A model from the realm of neural cognition describes the course of the brain’s activity, at the functional level, in response to situations of uncertainty. This neural track, which begins in the brain stem and ends in the hippocampus, effectively indicates that the brain actually operates optimally in situations of uncertainty, combining and presiding over many vital cerebral structures, which routinely or in situations of supposed certainty do not operate together in such an orchestrated manner. Effectively, the brain mobilizes all its resources to traverse the environment of uncertainty and to learn and deduce from it something new, intertwining cognitive abilities related to orienting, mobilizing emotions, managing, controlling, planning and also learning and memory. Thus, a certain level of uncertainty benefits us, it causes to stay sharp.
And the second thing – I’ll risk sounding New Agey, but never mind. Our way, as human beings, to cope with a prolonged environment of uncertainty, passes through a release from holding on. Letting go. In such an environment, we need to adopt flexible, shifting modes of thinking, in accordance with Kruglanski’s five principles, because our in-built, rigid schemas of thought simply fall apart. Will I be overdoing it if I quote from the Babylonian Talmud?
Feel free.
It’s written in Tractate Ta’anit: “The Sages [taught]: A person should always be soft like a reed, and he should not be stiff like a cedar. ”
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