Handbook of the Uncertain Self

Robert M. Arkin, Kathryn C. Oleson, Patrick J. Carroll, Robert M. Arkin, Kathryn C. Oleson, Patrick J. Carroll

• Publisher: Psychology Press
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780805861877
• eBook ISBN: 9781136950568
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

This Handbook explores the cognitive, motivational, interpersonal, clinical, and applied aspects of personal uncertainty. It showcases both the diversity and the unity that defines contemporary perspectives on uncertainty in self within social and personality psychology. The contributions to the volume are all written by distinguished scholars in personality, social psychology, and clinical psychology united by their common focus on the causes and consequences of self-uncertainty.

Chapters explore the similarities and differences between personal uncertainty and other psychological experiences in terms of their nature and relationship with human thought, emotion, motivation, and behavior. Specific challenges posed by personal uncertainty and the coping strategies people develop in their daily life are identified. There is an assessment of the potential negative and positive repercussions of coping with the specific experience of self-uncertainty, including academic, health, and relationship outcomes. Throughout, strategies specifically designed to assist others in confronting the unique challenges posed by self-uncertainty in ways that emphasize healthy psychological functioning and growth are promoted.

In addition, the contributions to the Handbook touch on the psychological, social, and cultural context of the new millennium, including concepts such as Friedman's "flat world, " confidence, the absence of doubt in world leaders, thethreat of terrorism since 9/11, the arts, doubt and religious belief, and views of doubt as the universal condition of humankind.

The Handbook is an invaluable resource for researchers, practitioners, and senior undergraduate and graduate students in social and personality psychology, clinical and counseling psychology, educational psychology, and developmental psychology.

1
Introduction: The Uncertain Self

PATRICK J. CARROLL, ROBERT M. ARKIN, and KATHRYN C. OLESON

These days, change seems to represent the only certainty of modern life. Although the demands of change transcend historical context to run throughout human history, our ancestors probably encountered relatively little change over the course of their daily lives. For example, the question “where do you see yourself in 5 years” may have befuddled medieval blacksmiths locked to the same profession and region throughout their lives. Without question, dramatic life changes occurred but such changes likely represented the exception rather than the norm of antiquity.

Well, times have changed, and the same question may seem standard in today’s society that has learned to expect major changes as the norm rather than the anomaly or exception. From the terror and uncertainty stemming from 9/11, to the globalization of the work place, to the digital revolution that Tom Friedman portrays in The World is Flat, people must prepare for and adapt themselves to rapid and dramatic changes in the world around them. One likely adaptation is that people embrace rather than resist the tides of change by becoming increasingly fluid themselves. Perhaps more than ever, people are willing to voluntarily institute dramatic changes in their professional, personal, and interpersonal lives. People routinely change careers, marry and divorce, exchange fast cars for mini-vans and yoga mats, move from one coast to the other and back again, and sometimes change back again to the fast car.

Friedman tells how exciting this new world is, but he also reminds the reader that people will be trampled if they don’t keep up with the change. Whether introduced by the individual or the environment, change injects modern life with a measure of uncertainty that poses new demands that can be difficult to manage. This uncertainty shrouds the self, the world, and interrelation between the two. As social and cultural environments have continued to shift and evolve at an ever-increasing pace, the once manageable problem of uncertainty has grown up to become one of the defining challenges of modern life.

This struggle is by no means a private one played out at the individual level but, rather, is one that extends beyond the individual to all levels of modern life from family, community culture, and to the world stage. At the cultural level, it has been expressed in contemporary movements within the arts, business, politics, consumer behavior, and other arenas. In the business world, it has been expressed in management models that characterize confidence as the key mechanism through which managerial decisions are translated into financial growth and success (e.g., Kanter, 2004).

“Consumer confidence” is the common index of United States’ and global concerns about the economy and job security. In contemporary politics, the apparent absence of doubt in some political leaders (Suskind, 2004) has become a source of concern to some, but a source of comfort to others. In the global political arena, the role of terrorism in inspiring fear and doubt, anger and vengeance, tends to determine political points of view and, in turn, is influenced by them.

In the arts, the hit Broadway play and now Oscar-nominated film “Doubt” by the celebrated playwright John Patrick Shanley is focused on people’s certainty of death and the ambiguity of everything else in their lives. Doubt is said to be the norm in life, the “universal condition of man” (Shanley, 2005). Syndicated columnist Maureen Dowd recently commented on the seeming backlash from the era of feminism, noting that it seems embodied in the political “red-state/blue-state” split of the nation today. “We are in an era of vamping, self-doubting Desperate Housewives, not strong, cutting Murphy Brown” (Dowd, 2004). As these examples illustrate, the human struggle with personal uncertainty is a grand and epic battle that only promises to increase in lockstep with the ever-increasing forces of change in daily life.

Within this historical context, the time seems ideal for social and personality psychologists to gather forces and confront the issue of personal uncertainty in the social world. And, why not? After all, the mission of social and personality psychology as a science is to respond to pressing social concerns to ultimately translate and apply its epistemic advancements to improve the human condition. With respect to these epistemic advancements, it should come as no surprise that social and personality psychologists have much to contribute to a better understanding of how people experience and cope with the demands of uncertainty in their personal lives.

Across its history, social and personality psychologists have been enamored of and (hopelessly) devoted to the study of uncertainty or doubt as core intellectual pursuits. In the 1950s, Leon Festinger in his theory of informal social communication (1950) noted that a pressure toward uniformity in group judgments stemmed from the uncertainty inspired by disunity. In more recent times, this press toward uniformity has inspired research into Groupthink, and both the beneficial and, more importantly, disastrous consequences of pressures to conform and to stifle one’s doubts (Janis, 1972). Social comparison theory (Festinger, 1954), later in the 1950s, set the stage for a longstanding tradition in which the search for clarity and certainty about one’s opinions, emotions, and abilities would guide theory and research for decades.

Today, “understanding” is still a central, guiding motive that organizes many people’s thinking about the social world and their place within that world. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, new theory and research on emotion and motivation as well as attributional processes (Schachter & Singer, 1962) and Jones and Gerard’s (1967) concept of Unequivocal Behavioral Orientation (UBO) built from these early foundations laid down by Festinger and Heider to show how people seek information, organize it, and strive to come to a conclusion about the causes of events. Attribution approaches preceded the so-called cognitive revolution in social psychology, and became linked with the “warmer” and rich tradition of exploring how people strive to establish prediction and control in their lives, and to deflect feelings of uncertainty, unclarity, and self-doubt.

Also, the research on self-deception, self-handicapping, subjective overachievement, causal uncertainty, and many other domains of inquiry all explore the role of motivation in social cognition, sometimes showing that people surprisingly strive to sustain their uncertainty or self-doubt and preserve their illusions rather than to confront reality squarely and seek always to be clear, to be certain, to be correct, as Festinger would have had it. Although past social and personality psychologists have made enormous contributions to the understanding of uncertainty, their intellectual bloodline runs through the cutting-edge contributions of today’s generation of self-uncertainty scholars. To this end, this Handbook presents in a theoretically organized way a representative sample of 20 leading perspectives (excluding this introductory chapter and the commentaries) within today’s social and personality psychology on personal uncertainty in social and personal life.

Overall Organization Apart from substantive quality, we used two criteria to select our ultimate organizational framework for this edited volume. Foremost, we wanted to select an organizational framework that defined the parameters of primary focus and level of analysis at the interface of person and environment. This perspective reflects the true viewpoint of social and personality psychology that permits the examination of uncertainty within the individual but also embraces analyses that reside at the interface of two or more people (e.g., Kipling Williams and others’ work on social exclusion). Although other perspectives may exist on the study of self-uncertainty and even more on the broader concept of uncertainty in general, the edited volume features contributors who consider the precursors and consequences of self-uncertainty within a broader social and cultural context rather than within a vacuum.

Second, we wanted to use a framework that struck the delicate balance between capturing core themes that cut across each of our individual selections without compromising the substantive diversity that separated each unique contribution. Ultimately, we separated the 20 individual contributions into three major parts according to distinct themes that unify the individual research programs: (1) Meta-Cognition and Uncertainty, (2) Motivation and Uncertainty, and (3) Clinical and Applied Implications of the Uncertain Self. In addition to the individual contributions, the edited volume begins with a preface and this opening chapter and closes with a fourth section comprised of three general commentaries provided by two experts on the topic of self-uncertainty (Ron Wright and Michael Hogg) and another chapter written by the editors. This unique combination of broad and specialized expertise provides the ideal context within which to both highlight and assimilate those contributions within the broader context of core themes that run throughout the handbook.

Part I surveys a diverse range of perspectives that emphasize the importance of metacognitive processes in the cause and consequences of uncertainty. In Chapter 2, Briñol, DeMarree, and Petty discuss their recent extensions of the Self-Validation Hypothesis to consider the role of meta-cognitive processes (e.g., self-confidence vs. doubt) in self-change. In Chapter 3, Eisenstadt and Leippe discuss how social feedback can affect eyewitness confidence by first altering the self-credibility that people assign to their own event memories. In Chapter 4, Schwartz discusses how unlimited personal freedom can overwhelm the human decision maker with numbing uncertainty. In Chapter 5, Weary, Tobin, and Edwards discuss how chronic and momentary forms of causal uncertainty beliefs bias social information processing. In Chapter 6, Szeto and Sorrentino discuss how individual differences in uncertainty orientation influence the degree to which people engage as well as understand their immediate social and cultural context. In Chapter 7, Van den Bos and Lind unpack their general theory of how people manage uncertainty through fairness judgments. In Chapter 8, Sedikides, De Cremer, Hart, and Brebels consider how self-uncertainty moderates responsiveness to fluctuation in procedural fairness information. In Chapter 9, Wirtz, Kruger, Miller, and Mathur discuss the first instinct fallacy (that second-guesses created by self-doubt may optimize decision performance under uncertainty, despite the prevailing wisdom that maintaining confidence in first choices holds the key to optimal decision performance). In Chapter 10, Johns and Schmader discuss the role of meta-cognitive regulation of feeling states in driving the effects of stereotype threat on social identity.

Part II includes contributions that consider the role of intrapsychic and interpersonal motivations in the development, maintenance, and consequences of uncertainty in self. In Chapter 11, Landau, Greenberg, and Kosloff discuss how uncertainty in self can be conceptualized as a breakdown in the buffer of self-esteem that people rely on to shield themselves from the terror of existential insecurity. In Chapter 12, Chang-Schneider & Swann review their research on how self-certainty may determine the ongoing struggle between enhancement and verification motives in social life. In Chapter 13, Marigold, McGregor, and Zanna describe compensatory conviction as a motivated strategy that defensive people employ to resolve the threat of self-relevant uncertainty. In Chapter 14, Leonardelli and Lakin consider how regulatory focus exerts a powerful contextual effect on self-evaluative motives. In Chapter 15, Carroll discusses how the fundamental need of preparedness shapes the construction and revision of self-relevant possibility. In Chapter 16, Chen, Law, and Williams examine how uncertainty in one’s relational security can be conceptualized as the immediate symptom of painful social exclusions. In Chapter 17, Reich and Arkin illustrate how perceived relational styles can influence feelings of self-doubt and, ultimately, self-attributions about upcoming evaluative performances.

Part III moves beyond the antecedents and processes of uncertainty in self to examine the clinical and applied effects of chronic personal uncertainty for mental health. In Chapter 18, Wichman and Hermann first discuss how personal uncertainty may place people at risk for more serious declines in self-worth in response to evaluative threats and then unpack a variety of clinically derived therapies that capitalize on certain characteristics of self-doubt to, paradoxically, reduce the experience and consequences of self-doubt. In Chapter 19, Phebe Cramer reviews clinical theory and evidence to shed light on the link between self-doubt and a variety of defense mechanisms. Kernis and Lakey in Chapter 20 describe how uncertain, fragile forms of self-esteem (vs. secure forms) are related to various forms of defensiveness. In Chapter 21, Oleson and Steckler consider how the same underlying sense of chronic self-doubt can be expressed in the seemingly disparate phenotypic strategies of self-handicapping or subjective overachievement depending on the individual’s chronic concern with performance.

The edited volume closes with Part IV, comprising three general commentaries provided by the editors of this volume as well as two other leading experts on the study of uncertainty in self. These commentaries attempt to summarize the contributions of the Handbook as well as set the stage for future research by identifying unresolved issues on the topic of uncertainty in self. Collectively, the goal of the individual contributions as well as the summary commentaries is to showcase the diversity and the unity that defines contemporary perspectives on uncertainty in self within social and personality psychology.

The Antecedents, Processes, and Consequences of Self-Uncertainty across Domains of Interests Self-confidence and self-doubt have never been discussed more in the literature of psychology, the popular press, and the academic disciplines of management, marketing, communication, political science, and others, than today. The chapters within this Handbook offer perspectives on personal uncertainty across a wide range of topics in social and personality psychology, including interpersonal relationships, judgment and decision-making, the motivational and emotional properties of the state of uncertainty in its various forms, and the determinants and consequences of personal uncertainty.

Of course, as with most handbooks, the different contributions featured in this volume address self-uncertainty from a diverse range of possible conceptual and methodological angles. Although we have categorized the chapters according to one of three major themes, the chapters can also be distinguished according to their focus on the antecedents, processes, or consequences of self-uncertainty. To some extent, each chapter provides a diverse mixture of research programs that represents theory and evidence across each of the three components of self-uncertainty we have defined—antecedents, processes, and consequences. Collectively, however, these chapters provide the reader with a balanced survey of contemporary work on the antecedents, processes, as well as consequences of self-uncertainty across a wide range of general and specific life domains.

With respect to the antecedents of self-uncertainty, several chapters featured identify a variety of factors (within the person as well as the environment) that account for why the experience of self-uncertainty arises and persists. For example, Mark Landau and his colleagues (Chapter 11) review the extensive body of research on Terror Management Theory, showing that the experience of uncertainty regarding the self can be traced, ironically, to one of the few ever-present certainties of life—death. These investigators make a compelling case that the intense terror evoked by events that enhance the salience of one’s own impending demise contributes to uncertainty in the self and the relation between one’s self and the broader comedy of existence. In addition, Darcy Reich and Robert Arkin (Chapter 17) make a compelling case that self-uncertainty originates as much in the perceptions of others as well as it does in self-perceptions. Specifically, these authors argue that the perceived implicit theories (entity vs. incremental) of an evaluative judge can affect feelings of self...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• About the Editors
• Contributors
• Preface
• 1 Introduction: The Uncertain Self
• Part I: Meta-Cognition and Uncertainty in Self
• Part II: Motivation and Uncertainty in Self
• Part III: Clinical and Applied Implications of the Uncertain Self
• Part IV: General Commentaries
• Author Index
• Subject Index