Acknowledging and Navigating Uncertainty

Q&A with Elizabeth Weingarten, author of How to Fall in Love with Questions: A New Way to Thrive in Times of Uncertainty.

Recently, when talking to clients, most of the conversation is around how to make decisions in an environment where uncertainty is so high. The Economic Policy Uncertainty Index offers a measurement of uncertainty that shows that uncertainty was higher in April of this year than it was in 2020, the year when we were in the middle of the covid pandemic.

We can all feel it. And it can be paralyzing.

Which is why Elizabeth Weingarten’s new book, How to Fall in Love with Questions: A New Way to Thrive in Times of Uncertainty, is so timely. Her book was released on April 15th and I can’t think of a more important read right now. She is an applied behavioral scientist who offers concrete and actionable ways to flourish in the face of volatility. I am obviously biased, but I was extremely excited to talk with Elizabeth about her book since it is about what’s probably my favorite topic on the planet: dealing with uncertainty in decision making. As you’ll read, the Q&A more than lived up to my (high!) expectations.

Uncertainty: Finding a common definition and overall approach

Annie: I’d like to start by just setting the table. I think that there's this interesting thing that happens with natural language terms. I have some idea of what I think a term means, and I assume that you probably have the same idea. Then, it turns out that we actually don't mean the same thing. “Uncertainty” is one of those words that everybody has an idea of its meaning, but it's not necessarily a shared definition. Given that the subtitle of your book is, “A New Way to Thrive in Times of Uncertainty,” and a lot of it is devoted to getting comfortable with uncertainty, I would love for you to share your definition of uncertainty as it relates to your work.

Elizabeth Weingarten: Yes, great question. As you say, there are a lot of definitions out there of uncertainty. The one that I found that I liked the most was from psychologists Raanan Lipshitz and Orna Strauss in 1997. I mention their paper in the introduction, writing about how uncertainty impacts decision makers and how they conceptualize making decisions and coping with it. They described uncertainty as “a sense of doubt that blocks or delays action.” I liked that because the other definitions that I read didn't quite get at the experience of uncertainty as that “stuckness,” which I think we can all relate to. There's something that you don't know, and you feel like you can't move forward. It's a very painful and frustrating experience. That is my favorite definition.

But I’m curious. What’s your definition and how does that square with it?

Annie: I think it squares really well because a lot of what I'm trying to get people to do is be very comfortable with uncertainty. You're obviously thinking about it in a complementary way. How do you get comfortable with it and how do you decide in the face of it?

When I'm talking about uncertainty, what I say is that it's a twofold problem. We're not omniscient and we don't have a time machine, which is a super big bummer. In other words, we don't know everything that there is to know. We know very little, in fact, in comparison to all there is to be known. We can sense that because we've all made decisions where we learn new stuff after the fact and we say, “I wish I knew then what I know now.” I think that a lot of that stuckness is, gosh, if only I could know more stuff, maybe I could get more sure and that would unstick me.

But then there's also the separate problem, which is the time machine problem. Even if you did know everything, the world is probabilistic. I could have all the knowledge in the world, but it doesn't mean I can see the future. I could always make the very best decision available to me, but maybe 15% of the time I'm going to get an outcome I don't like. Guess what? I'm going to observe that outcome 15% of the time. That contributes to the stuckness because we’re anticipating how we’ll feel bad or regret our choice if we get this bad outcome.

I think that we're in a complementary space because I'm trying to get people to make decisions even though we aren’t omniscient and don’t have a time machine, which is a form of comfort with it. It’s part of the human condition. How do you live in that?

Elizabeth Weingarten: Exactly. Uncertainty can keep us feeling stuck. As you say, you need to figure out how to move forward without having all the answers. You have to accept that you may never get certainty. To me, questions are these tools that help us move forward in the face of uncertainty. They're our guides, they're our GPS, and you don't have to have an answer to move forward. Questions can help you move forward by framing and filtering what you're looking for, what's important to you. In that way, they could also be seen as decision-making guides.

Our frequent, flawed responses to decision-making uncertainty

Annie: I think part of the issue is that people are genuinely confused as to how you are supposed to move forward without knowing. When I'm teaching, I can't tell you how many times I say, “You can't know. Accept that.” What you're trying to do is get yourself to a place where you're moving a little bit more toward accuracy, but you can't know, and you have to be okay with it.

What I see happening a lot with people, and tell me if this resonates with you, is that when they're in a situation where they sense, okay, I've got this problem, which is I can't get complete information, they go one of two ways. One is by getting stuck. I'm going to keep gathering information and make incremental gains in what I know, even if those gains have no chance of changing my decision, which they very often don't. It’s all about this idea that I want to be sure before choosing. That gets you stuck and slows you down. But the other path in these situations where people really have uncertainty slapping them in the face, is that they go in the other direction, just going way too fast. They’re like, screw it, I can’t know. I'm going to wing it.

I'd love to hear your thoughts on those two paths.

Elizabeth Weingarten: What that makes me think of immediately is Arie Kruglanski’s research on the need for closure. Kruglanski is a psychologist who coined this term that's essentially about how quickly we feel like we need answers in a situation where we don't know. He developed a scale, and you can measure, in a given situation, how high your need for closure is on the scale. If you have a high need for closure, like that second category that you're talking about, you're going to have of a tendency to seize and freeze on an answer. I talk a lot in the book about fast, easy answers and what it means to accept uncertainty in the context of a world in which so many of us are addicted to fast, easy answers.

I think what that can look like is, exactly as you say, that we are so uncomfortable with uncertainty that we end up at one end of a spectrum or the other. On one end of the spectrum is analysis paralysis. That's where we're avoiding doing anything because we are afraid that it's going to be the wrong decision. Then, on the other end of the spectrum, you have people who are being fed, by social media and all sorts of other sources in this moment, fast, easy answers to the big questions in life.

The problem that I see is that we don't understand how to feel comfortable and accept that space in between of being in uncertainty. When that happens, we fall into one of those traps. Plus, we are embedded in a social system right now that makes it even harder to resist those answers because they're coming at us from all directions. You have media context that we're embedded in, as well as the many industries that have been created around providing what I would call the ultra-processed answers. It's like they've been stripped of their nutrient value and been condensed. It's not that they're always bad, but they are not going to be the types of answers that are going to help you move forward when it comes to some of your big life questions about meaning, purpose, relationships.

I think you're exactly right. There are these two ends of the spectrum there that can be equally problematic in different ways, but we exist in a culture that makes it hard to break out of that.

How the current environment makes it especially hard to accept uncertainty

Annie: I want to dig deeper on that. I want to hear your thoughts on, at least in society today, what our relationship with uncertainty is and being willing to just live in that.

When I think about this feeling of being stuck, something interesting that happens is that the need to know dominates any other thing. I think an undercurrent of your writing is, if you're spending a lot of time because you need to know and you're uncomfortable with not knowing, that is time you can't spend finding joy in other places.

One of the examples that I always think about is when you see someone being tortured by a restaurant menu. It's like, is this actually worth my 15 minutes of time where I'm asking everybody at the table their opinions and what they are going to order and, meanwhile, I'm not getting to socialize with the people I came with? I think part of the problem is that we feel like we should be able to know the answer since it’s about our own tastes, even though you’ve never had the dish. That feeling makes us lose out by taking so much time with a decision that in the end isn't all that impactful. I've had lots of bad meals at restaurants, and I don't think it's impacted my life at all.

How much do you feel is driven by this idea that we think there is an answer, we should be able to find it, and why we’re so uncomfortable with the idea that, no, there's not?

Elizabeth Weingarten: Let’s start with the discomfort piece. As humans, we are wired to want to reduce uncertainty in our environments. That's because, at any given moment, we're basically, at a biological level, trying to use as little energy as possible. That was a smart adaptation for when food was scarce, but not as much now. When we're trying to be comfortable in uncertainty, navigating uncertainty forces us to use more metabolic energy. That means we feel this powerful drive to resolve it, to conserve future energy. That's known as the selfish brain theory. Of course, not everybody feels the same level of discomfort with uncertainty. Some people feel different levels of comfort across contexts and situations, and there are lots of variables that can influence this. One that I mentioned previously is this need for cognitive closure and how comfortable are you in this space of ambiguity and not knowing. Another thing that influences our relationship to uncertainty is our personality and particularly our levels of openness to new ideas and experiences.

I think there's an interesting element there when you talk about the restaurant menu. There are people that are excited about trying something new and they're like, yeah, let's go for it versus the person that is maybe feeling anxious because they don't know about that new thing and they would maybe prefer to have the old thing that they've had before, but there's part of them that's like, but I want try something new. And, to your point, why am I spending so much time thinking about this? This is maybe not as important as other things.

Also, I'll just say a final thing about this before returning to the restaurant example. In many ways, we're living in a uniquely challenging time to be able to tolerate uncertainty. There's research from Nicholas Carleton, a psychology professor at the University of Regina in Canada, and he's found that as smartphone and internet penetration has gone up, so has our intolerance of uncertainty. Of course, this is a correlation. It does not necessarily mean that there's a causal relationship there, but that intuitively seems right. Having answers at our fingertips all the time means that we're regularly missing out on opportunities to practice sitting with uncertainty. This can atrophy our capacity to do it. Another factor is we have more access than ever to information about how uncertain the world is, which can be overwhelming in and of itself.

In terms of the questions that I'm writing about in the book, there's an interesting parallel there to the situation where you’re looking at the menu, trying to figure out what to do and trying to get certainty. In a way, that's an exercise of sitting with uncertainty that helps to build that muscle and prepare you for some of the uncertainty in the big life questions. When we're not doing that or when we're floundering, we may not be setting ourselves up to be able to exist in uncertainty in some of those other moments.

Annie: You mentioned an interesting point about living in this age of the internet. I'm going to date myself, but when I grew up, if I wanted to find out the answer to something, I could look at a pretty dated encyclopedia. Or I could go to the library and look at some microfiche or something. I couldn't just pick up a smartphone and get answers, which I now do all the time. I'll be watching television and I'll be like, how old is the star of this show? Boom. Now I know how old that actor is, but that's true with a lot of different things. If I'm interested in finding a base rate, I can easily find out things like the percentage of people who change colleges in the process of getting a degree.

But I think what I'm hearing you say is that there are two things going on at once, which is really bad for us in terms of our comfort. One is that we're being trained that we should know everything right away, and you should never have to sit not knowing something because it's all right there. We don’t develop that muscle because we don’t find ourselves in that situation, where we have to throw our arms in the air and say, “I don't know how old this person is who's starring in this show, and I'm not going to know.”

In one sense, the ability to access all this information gives us a feeling that there's greater certainty in the world than there is. But then in the other sense, I didn't used to know so many things about plane crashes and fires and auto accidents and what's happening in the world and conflicts in foreign lands and things like that. You would get some sense of it from the news, but it wasn't in real time. It wasn't as in depth, and I wasn't being bombarded with it 24-7.

It sounds like you're saying, on the one hand, we're losing tolerance for uncertainty because there's this knowledge loop that's there for us for the taking. But on the other hand, it's increasing our sense of uncertainty. On a global scale, we're confronted with the fact that the world is much more uncertain than it actually is. Is that fair?

Elizabeth Weingarten: You've got it exactly right. I think one feeds the other. We're reading stories every day about how uncertain the world is and what does that do to us? Well, we are freaking out because of selfish brain theory. On the one hand, there's this global sense of uncertainty, and then of course there's all the personal uncertainty that we're dealing with day to day in our own lives. But I think all that combines into this sense of real anxiety and stress over all of the uncertainty at the micro and macro level.

There's a literature about the science of patience that I write about in the book. Patience, these days, is far from being a virtue. Part of the social contract is that as we progress in our technology as a species, that we should be able to avoid patience altogether. We should just get everything immediately. I see the same thing playing out in our relationship between answers and uncertainty, this feeling that, if I can't get the answer, there's something wrong with me or there's something wrong with how I'm pursuing this. But I think it's even more pervasive because you have not just stories in the world that are telling us how uncertain things are, you also have so many influencers or various guru figures on social media that so many of us follow. Again, I think that path boils down very complicated topics into, oh, this simple three-step plan is what happiness is.

Of course, there's lots of legitimate scientific research about happiness out there, but I think that’s different than trying to sell somebody on an idea that if you just do these things in your life, you it will have this outcome for you. You don't have to do any work yourself to figure out what does happiness mean to me? What's it going to look like for me in my life and my context? I think you're absolutely right to call out this.

You can think of it as a cycle. We're getting uncertainty on one hand and it's driving this behavior to want more certainty, and yet we're not set up biologically or from a systems perspective to be able to do that. That's why it's really, really hard.

The charlatans of certainty

Annie: Could you make clear for people reading this the distinction between what researchers on the science of happiness are doing and what influencers are doing?

Elizabeth Weingarten: Absolutely. There is great scientific research on happiness. People like Laurie Santos are doing excellent work on that topic and sharing things that are real and valuable.

Annie: I think of that research as probabilistic. Like, if I'm having dinner with you and we have our phones in our bags under the table, we'll tend to have a better conversation. But it's not that it's 100% likely. If I take a walk and leave my phone at home, it’s going to make me happier to some degree. That difference might sound eggheady, but it's important that the scientific work on happiness is about small gains that, when you iterate those things over time, will tend to have compounding, positive effects, but it's not a guarantee. That thing you try might not make you happy. It's not a secret to happiness. It's a thing you can do that in a probabilistic way that will tend to increase your happiness.

Elizabeth Weingarten: Yes, and that’s in contrast to the folks I refer to in the book as “the charlatans of certainty.” These are people who are often purposefully lying or manipulating others into this idea that they have all the answers. You have programs where you just have to keep coming back and paying more and more and more, and they're like, the answers will be in the next program. You have people that get sucked into that. Or what I found is pervasive in some contexts is people are selling you a particular type of answer. If it doesn't work for you, then the problem is you, not the answer.

Annie: This is my problem with a book like The Secret. I hate that book.

Elizabeth Weingarten: That's so funny. I have not read it. But I think there are a lot of self-help books like that. “I have the gospel, do these things, and if it doesn't work for you, then that's your issue.” But this is the capital-T Truth.

Annie: Which of course is not like Laurie Santos. That's real science.

Elizabeth Weingarten: Yes.

Annie: If you go out and you walk in nature with no electronics, don't listen to an audio book, don't put music on, just go do that on, that on average is going to increase your happiness.

Elizabeth Weingarten: Right.

Annie: That is not someone saying, if it doesn't work for you, there's something wrong with you. The legitimate happiness research shows that this is better on average across the population. This tends to be better than not doing that thing in terms of someone's happiness. That’s clearly different from someone saying, “Here's the secret, and if it doesn't work for you, you are broken.”

Elizabeth Weingarten: Exactly. That's the stuff that's really harmful and that can get into your head. Influencers are showing you a picture – one they’ve created and edited – of their lives. It’s no wonder that such a person looks like they’ve got their life together. Of course, that's really seductive. If you're in pain, really struggling with a question in your life, it’s only human to want relief and to want to connect with somebody else.

Another thing that’s important to understand, and this was a big insight for me in my experience and journey, is that sometimes when we’re searching for answers to some of these questions, an aspect of it is that we’re just feeling lonely and we want to connect. We want a community around the uncertainty. It's not necessarily that an influencer’s five-step program is going to help us, but what really is helping us or helping me, or so many people I spoke to for the book, is knowing that you’re not alone and sharing those questions with other people. That feeling of community is what helps us exist in uncertainty and move forward through uncertainty.

How we got this way: From small tribes to momfluencers

Annie: Going back to this exposure that the internet gives us, when I think about how we evolved in small tribes, is that part of that wiring? We created these social groups, and I feel like part of what the tribe was doing was offering you certainty. It was telling you not to ask questions. These are our beliefs. These are the things that bind us together. We will tell you the answers. A lot of the benefit of being in a small tribe was obviously survival but, to make the tribe work, there had to be a reduction of uncertainty. Can you speak a little bit to that and how that translates into a modern society? There were these evolutionary tribal advantages. Now, we live in a very different world, but we have these brains that are left over from that.

Elizabeth Weingarten: That's exactly right. There is research suggesting that a big benefit of living in small groups in tribes was the reduction of uncertainty and the increased sense of security. It definitely connects or follows that one of the ways that we can feel more secure and safer in the context of uncertainty is by connecting with others. But as we well know, at least in the U.S., there's a loneliness epidemic. Many people are finding it harder and harder to connect in person.

I see a lot of the influencers out there offer the illusion of connection. But we're trying to do what we think we should do when feeling insecure and uncertain, which is, I need more people. I need somebody to tell me that I'm okay. I need somebody to help me. Sometimes, we’re looking for connection in the wrong places, asking questions of the wrong sources in those contexts. One of the ways that I saw this play out really, really clearly and that I write about it in the book is when you become a new parent. There is this whole community of momfluencers.

Annie: That's actual name for them?

Elizabeth Weingarten: I've seen “mom influencers,” but you could also say “momfluencers.” Certainly, there are some people out there that are sharing valuable information. I would put somebody like Emily Oster in this category who's really trying to share science-based, evidence-based information.

That's great, but you also have lots of other people that are sharing stuff that's exploitative, and it's designed to take advantage of people that are in probably one of the most uncertain periods of life. I think anybody who has become a parent knows that you are just awash in questions after you have a kid. Just at a basic level, you have no idea what you're doing. I remember when my husband and I came home with our now-seven-month-old, we were like, how do you even change a diaper? You have these small questions, but then you have these bigger questions about who am I and who am I becoming? How do I co-parent with somebody when we're both stressed out and we're not sleeping? What does it look like to maintain my relationship with my partner and my friends? So many women and others experience this and there's this drive to find answers, and you're just consuming tons of this influencer content, but you're feeling worse and worse.

Annie: Like you’re failing in comparison?

Elizabeth Weingarten: Yes, exactly, like your life doesn't match up. But what so many people are actually craving is just to talk to somebody who's going through the same stuff and who can say, “Hey, it's okay. I don't know what I'm doing either.” We can just be in this space of not knowing.

Annie: You talk about the charlatans of certainty, offering answers delivered with such certainty, and you also talk about the epidemic of loneliness and the way that we think we're failing. It seems like an outgrowth of that is while people are seeking community, what it's actually doing is dividing us. Once you feel someone has given you “the right way,” what that means is that everybody else who's doing something different is wrong, which is absurd. It feels like it does divide us in that way. Does that make sense?

Elizabeth Weingarten: Yes, totally. I think that's absolutely right.

The “protein people” versus the evolution of knowledge

Annie: Well, okay, so here's a question that I have for you. There are so many people who get very religious about their keto or this diet or that diet or whatever, and they're very certain that their way is right, and they want to preach it to everybody else. For example, there are “protein people” where everything is about how much protein you get. )No offense to the protein people out there – unless you're pontificating a lot, in which case, offense intended.)

Something I wonder about is how those people would react if you engaged them in terms of the arc of time. Humanity knows almost nothing, but we know more than we used to. I could say to a protein person, “Do you remember in 1980, when everybody believed you were supposed to avoid eating any fat?” Everything was low fat, and it didn't matter how much sugar you had.

Elizabeth Weingarten: Oh, yeah. I grew up in that household.

Annie: I remember Snackwells at my house. They were considered the healthy choice because they were low fat, even though they were loaded with sugar. Margarine was better than butter. Obviously, you can do that with what we understood about the way the sun and the earth interacted, pre-Copernicus and post-Copernicus. There's a great book called The Half-Life of Facts by Sam Arbesman that talks about this.

I'm curious as to your thoughts on that, because I think we all recognize this building of knowledge and that there's a whole bunch of the stuff that I thought when I was a twenty year old that isn't true anymore. I now look at that and go, whoa, that was really wrong. I mean, we used to put leeches on people. I know that can possibly be a legitimate treatment, but we used to put leeches on people for everything. There was a time when bloodletting was a widespread medical practice. There was a time when we burned people for being witches. I think the protein people would acknowledge all that stuff. But can they put themselves in the shoes of someone burning someone for being a witch? Because those people were certain they had the answer. Can they imagine that they could have been that person?

Elizabeth Weingarten: I think what you're getting to is that it’s hard for us to let go of the idea that we can control outcomes in our lives, particularly when the stakes are, at least theoretically, about life and death. Sometimes, when we cling to certainty or answers, it's because there's something bigger behind it. If we really drill down, a lot of times it's because there's this much deeper fear around things like mortality or being rejected by a tribe or by community. These are very basic human concerns.

Because those are such innate drives for us, they can get in the way of higher order thinking. I see that play out in the corporate context where people can really wax poetic about how great it is to ask questions and the wisdom of not knowing. But when it comes down to facing the CEO in the boardroom, they ultimately want to hear an answer. It doesn't cut it to say, “I don't know.” This tension that plays out across all our lives where, yes, we know this, and yet when the stakes feel really high, all of a sudden all that goes out the window because it truly feels like we are under significant threat.

What can we do about it? The questions map

Annie: That gets to the aspect of the book where you explain the importance of embracing the questions rather than expecting fast, easy answers. In those moments where we feel threatened, how do we use questions to diffuse that threat?

Elizabeth Weingarten: This is where I think sometimes if you have a little bit of a longer time horizon, a little more patience can come into play or just slowing down and pausing. Again, that’s easier said than done, particularly when you're activated and stressed out. But that was one of the things that I talked about with lots of therapists for the book as well. How do we act in those moments where we're super anxious, we're spinning out, and we're more likely to cling to certainty, ideology, answers, whatever it is, even when, at some other level, we understand that we don’t know for sure?

This was exactly why I wanted to introduce a questions map in the book. This is something to help you create a questions practice, and that's going to look different for everybody. But the basic idea is we have yoga practice, we have meditation practice, but can you regularly come back to a practice that helps you gain awareness of some of the big questions that you're asking in your life? Fundamentally, the map is intended to help people move through uncertainty, not necessarily for the purpose of finding an answer, but getting clarity on some of the points that you bring up. What do I already know? Is this the right question for me? How do I know if it's the right question? If it's not the right question, what would a better question be?

Then, fundamentally, how am I going to take action on trying to understand this question better? What resources can I get? Who can I lean on for support? Then, at the end, coming back and reflecting on, do I want to keep pursuing this question? Did I find a different, better question to think about? Do I want to let this question go? Did I find an answer to this question? But the idea is exactly as you're talking about, to help people in that space of feeling stuck. We get the sense that we don't know anything, but actually we do know some things. Also, we have a good way of figuring out what we don't know or figuring out how much time we want to spend thinking about this question.

Connection between conspiracy theories and need for certainty?

Annie: I want to ask you one more question before you have to go, because there was a subject that really came to mind while I was reading the book. There have always been conspiracy theories. There were moon landing truthers and JFK truthers. I guess the witch trials were a conspiracy theory, so we could go all the way back there. But it seems like there’s been an explosion of them, which feels very related to people's need for certainty. It’s causing people to make connections that they shouldn’t be very certain about. Then, they are impervious to counter-evidence because they're already certain about those beliefs. I would love, as a closing, if you could talk about whether there’s a relationship between what you’re writing and thinking about and conspiratorial thinking.

Elizabeth Weingarten: I think you hit the nail on the head. I would lump conspiracy theories and theorists in that same category as the charlatans of certainty. You can also boil it down to it being a fast, easy answer to complex questions and problems, when oftentimes the answer is that we don’t know.

But that feels really bad and scary, particularly when it's something that feels like it impacts someone's life, and we want the answer. This was an area that I found to be really salient. We were talking about the mom influencer space, and there was this rabbit hole that I heard people talk about going down, which was conspiracies over vaccines and how connected some of the influencers were, and selling you some of these larger conspiratorial stories about, like, “If you're afraid as a parent, here's what you really need to be afraid of. There's this mess of things that the government is trying to do to you and your kids.” I think very much I would connect that to this broader problem that I absolutely saw in writing the book.

Annie: It does feel like sometimes we actually know the answer, but if the answer has to do with uncertainty, they won't accept it.

Elizabeth Weingarten: Yes. I think there's a self-righteousness there too. We like to feel that we're in the know. There's this other way in which it's like this is a secret thing. There are so many factors there, but I think a big part of it is certainty. Then, as humans, we love a story. We love something to fit into a narrative. What conspiracies offer is that ready-made narrative framework of like, yeah, it's not just random, but it's because this happened, and then this happened and this happened. I think that's also very seductive.

Annie: This has been a super fun conversation. I hope a lot of people read How to Fall in Love with Questions. Society would be better for it.