Uncertainty-Identity Theory

Uncertainty and the Need to Reduce Uncertainty

Feeling uncertain about our perceptions, attitudes, values, or feelings motivates us to address the uncertainty. Uncertainty can be an exhilarating challenge to be confronted and resolved, making us feel edgy and alive, but it can also be anxiety provoking and stressful, making us feel impotent and unable to predict or control our world and what will happen to us in it. Although we strive to resolve, manage, or avoid feeling uncertain, we do not do this all the time; some uncertainties we simply do not care much about, and therefore we do not bother to dedicate our stretched cognitive resources to them. We expend cognitive energy resolving only those uncertainties that are important or matter to us in a particular context.

One factor that imparts motivational impetus to feeling uncertain is self-relevance. We are particularly motivated to reduce uncertainty if we feel uncertain about things that reflect on or are relevant to self or if we are uncertain about self per se about our identity, who we are, how we relate to others, and how we are socially located. Ultimately, we like to know who we are, how to behave, and what to think, as well as who others are, how they might behave, and what they might think.

Although we are, therefore, in the business of reducing self-uncertainty, there will always be some degree of uncertainty (we cannot ever attain absolute certainty); uncertainty-identity theory is about reducing uncertainty rather than achieving certainty. It is also important to bear in mind that individuals and groups may sometimes embark on courses of action that in the short term increase uncertainty, such as when the individual or group is confident that the experience of short-term uncertainty is necessary in order to resolve more enduring contradictions and uncertainties that have arisen.

Social Identity and Uncertainty Reduction

Feelings of uncertainty can be resolved in many different ways. However, self-uncertainty and self-relevant uncertainty are particularly efficiently reduced by the process of psychologically identifying with a group: group identification.

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