How uncertainty-tolerant are you?
How our love of predictability may hinder adaptation to an unstable world. And: my new book comes out this week.
Let me start with an exciting announcement. My new book De onzekerheidsepidemie [The Uncertainty Epidemic] will be released in the Netherlands and Belgium this week! It’s the culmination of three years of hard work and I can’t wait to share it with readers.
The book narrates how technological advances have made us dependent on predictability and control over our daily lives, while the world around us is becoming more and more uncertain. This growing tension feeds stress, mental ill-health, polarization and distrust. Fortunately, there are science-backed solutions that can help us reinvent our relationship with uncertainty.
The book is first appearing in Dutch; an English translation is forthcoming. You can pre-order the book to receive it on launch day. On Friday evening (April 24th) we are holding a launch event at Spui25 in Amsterdam. Tickets are free (and nearly sold out, so act fast). If you’re in the area, I look forward to seeing you there!
I hope you will forgive me for my absence on Substack as I finished the book. From here on out, I will use this space to share new insights and unfolding debate about the uncertainty epidemic, which ties together my academic research and my science communication activities. My posts will be irregular but always packed with new ideas.
To start off this new series, I would like to share my latest paper with you. In this study, my co-authors and I found that intolerance of uncertainty has increased in young adults from Canada and the United States from the 1990s to today. Rising intolerance of uncertainty is one of the pillars of the uncertainty epidemic detailed in my book, and it could be contributing factor to the ongoing youth mental health crisis. Read on to learn more and, as always, please consider sharing and subscribing to my work. Thank you.
‘I always want to know what the future has in store for me’
‘I can’t stand being taken by surprise.’
‘I should be able to organize everything in advance.’
Do these statements feel true to you? Then you are in increasingly good company.
In 1994, a team of Canadian psychologists wondered why people with anxiety worry so much. In the words of Baz Luhrmann, ‘worrying is as effective as trying to solve an algebra equation by chewing bubble gum’. So why spend all this time worrying about what may or may not happen to you?
The psychologists concluded—a radical insight at the time—that worry is not driven by any specific fear, such as the fear that you might lose your job or a loved one may fall ill. Instead, they proposed, worry is driven by the inability to tolerate uncertainty itself. They called this intolerance of uncertainty (IU) and created a questionnaire to measure it, which contained the items listed at the top.
Over the years, researchers built the case that intolerance of uncertainty contributes to anxiety. A recent meta-analysis summarized 26 intervention studies and found that therapies that tackle IU are effective at reducing worry and other anxiety symptoms. During the COVID-19 pandemic, IU had a bit of a moment when researchers showed that a high score on the IU scale was one of the best predictors of pandemic-related anxiety and doomscrolling.
This made me curious about trends in IU itself. We know that the prevalence of anxiety symptoms has increased markedly in the past thirty years or so, especially among young adults. And our relationship to uncertainty has undergone rapid change, for instance through the availability of mobile phones. Could it be that the increase in anxiety symptoms was mirrored (or even caused) by a change in the degree to which we are able to tolerate uncertainty itself?
Together with colleagues from Columbia University, Boston University, and the University of Regina, I wrote a paper that attempts to answers this question. We tried to collect all peer-reviewed research published since 1994—that first paper from Canada—that measures IU in a consistently defined group of young adults: undergraduate students in Canada and the U.S. We included measurements from more than 120 samples taken between 1992 and 2022, totaling roughly 34,000 participants. We compared the average level of IU reported in these samples over time, and found a pretty striking result:
Since the early 1990s, the average level of intolerance of uncertainty in Canadian and U.S. young adults has gone up markedly, with an acceleration starting around 2011. This was true even when we adjusted our statistical models for modest changes in the sex/gender and age distributions of student samples.
This is surprising, because researchers have long interpreted IU as a psychological trait, a relatively stable feature of one’s personality. I know of no other personality trait whose average level has shifted by a whole standard deviation over the course of a few decades. Either IU is not a trait but a situation-specific attitude, or something has drastically changed how trait IU develops over childhood. Either way, young adults in Canada and the U.S. have become less tolerant of uncertainty over the past thirty years.
We don’t know what caused this trend. We also don’t know for sure if this caused increasing anxiety. But the evidence is suggestive. IU went up in the past thirty years, with an acceleration in the early 2010s, right around the time when poor mental health became more common in young adults. If IU is indeed critical to the development of anxiety, as many researchers believe, rising IU among young adults may have contributed to the rising anxiety rates in this population.
This work is not yet peer-reviewed. We are about to submit it to an academic journal. But we decided to publish a preprint—a tentative version of the paper—because it may be valuable to ongoing discussions about mental health in young adults. Preprints are also great for collecting feedback, which we can use to make the paper stronger. So if you are curious and/or have thoughts: please access the preprint HERE and let me know in the comments what you think.
One thing that struck me as I analyzed these data, and which you may have thoughts about, is the acceleration we see begin around 2011. Jonathan Haidt points to 2012 as the start of the ‘anxious generation’, as this is when smartphones became widely available in teenagers. However, he’s not very specific about what smartphones do to kids: they may promote low self-esteem, enable cyberbullying, or weaken cognitive abilities by distracting teenagers in schools. So how, precisely, did phones raise anxiety rates? Our findings suggest a potential mechanism: the smartphone revolution lowered our ability to tolerate uncertainty, which in turn caused widespread anxiety.
When discussing psychology we all have lived experience, so let me know in the comments if this conjecture seems true to you.
Is it growing intolerance to uncertainty or growing exposure to uncertainty?
Perhaps you can find connections in Fukuyama's 1995 book "Trust" in which he says that the US has been a high trust country, which seems to have changed.