For our project “The Uncertainty Boom,” we spoke with five experts on the effects of widespread uncertainty on our society, the economy and even the ways we think and act. 

Here, we speak with Kate Sweeny, a professor of psychology at the University of California, Riverside, where she runs the Life Events Lab. She studies the cognitive and behavioral effects of uncertainty and how waiting for outcomes can lead to poor decision-making. This interview has been edited for clarity and length. 

How do you describe your work?

For most of my career, I've focused on a particular sort of uncertainty, which is not knowing something specific in the future that you want to know: “Did I pass that exam?” ”Is this symptom a sign of something worse?” “Did I get the job I applied for?”  I think of it as acute uncertainty, so not the lingering broad, what's-going-on-in-the-world uncertainty. Some of the things I've learned probably apply more broadly. 

What happens to people during periods of acute uncertainty? 

Worry tends to be kind of at the heart of that experience. I think of worry as a combination of anxiety and future-focused, repetitive, typically negative thoughts. There is a cognitive piece in the sense that [when] worry gears up, it tends to hijack our thinking. We have trouble sleeping, we feel sick, we eat worse, we don't exercise as much.  

How does it affect our decision-making?

We tend to make decisions that may not be as good for us in the long run, but that might mitigate uncertainty in the moment. One classic medical example is when men get the news that they have an elevated PSA test, which suggests that they might have prostate cancer. The common recommendation, if there are no other signs that there's a problem, is wait-and-see. But lots of men end up opting for surgery or radiation, which have really nasty and long-term side effects because the thought of just waiting in this constant state of uncertainty is intolerable. That's not an option they're willing to take. 

In one study, women who were undergoing treatment for breast cancer rated the uncertainty before their diagnosis as being harder than the diagnosis or the treatment.

That is a very consistent finding across a couple of studies. We have women on the other side of the journey, in remission or at the end stages of treatment being asked what was the hardest part. The majority of women will say it was the not-knowing. That was a very striking finding to me. I frequently get credit for that finding, but it's not mine actually. 

We had a particular paper where we found in situations with a clear resolution, for example, people taking the bar exam, that bad news is obviously a shock and comes with lots of negative emotions. But it also does resolve anxiety. Failing the bar exam or getting a cancer diagnosis is actually an anxiety-reducing event. When uncertainty is resolved, even if it's resolved negatively, we get some relief from that torture.

Are there studies of what happens when uncertainty is prolonged or open-ended?

I thought about this a lot during Covid. We kind of went back to normal life, but we never knew when we would be pulled out of normal life again as happened a few times. Often these more prolonged periods of uncertainty manifest in chronic stress. Uncertainty becomes noticeable and problematic when it becomes acute. So a cancer survivor who's been in remission for years is going in for their yearly scan. Suddenly now this kind of persistent uncertainty in the background comes to the foreground. 

Why does the human brain struggle so much with uncertainty and ambiguity? 

It's a fascinating question. Why on earth would waiting be the hardest part? Why would I rather get bad news and have resolution than continue in this in the spirit of uncertainty? It’s just so irrational. 

We know from research that worry is really good to have. Worry is the thing that kind of turns the alarm on, that something bad might be coming and that you need to potentially try to avoid or prepare for it. So these unpleasant things that feel very disruptive are actually incredibly beneficial. 

There's a deeper process that's not really testable, but is sensible. As an evolving species, those of us who were uncomfortable with uncertainty probably did better from a survival perspective. 

You mentioned that alarm that goes off. What if the alarm just keeps ringing?

Our stress systems, unfortunately, do have kind of a mode they can click into physiologically where your cortisol remains high, your heartbeat remains high, you're in this persistent, stressed-out state and that does some really gnarly damage to our bodies. For folks who have trauma or generalized anxiety disorder, it is just an alarm that's going off at all times. Folks who have that diagnosis, one of the things that's very characteristic of them is not just frequent worry, but actually a sense that their worry is useful. So almost like a voluntary embrace of worry. 

Does chronic worry prompt certain behaviors?

Seeking distractions, that's probably the big one. One of my colleagues and I published a paper on information seeking and avoidance. The upshot of that paper is that we actually do both when we're really worried, flipping between them. I'm putting my phone down. Oh, I'm picking it up. I think it is this frantic effort to recalibrate our feelings away from this intense feeling of worry. 

Are those good impulses or destructive impulses?

We don't have a lot of evidence that they help much. We do have some evidence from some of my earliest work that it might make it worse. Our toolbox for coping with uncertain waiting periods is not very well-built or sturdy perhaps because of what I said earlier, which is that getting rid of the feeling of uncertainty is perhaps not to our advantage. 

Have you been able to discern differences in how people react to uncertainty based on personality types or temperament? 

There's certainly evidence that would suggest that we do tend to worry less as we get older. In terms of personality, we have found a few pretty consistent trends. People who are naturally optimistic tend to have an easier time with uncertain waiting of various sorts. People who are more kind of emotionally unstable, more just emotionally negative in general, tend to have a harder time with worry and waiting. 

Is there a social element to dealing with uncertainty? Do communities or even societies react?

It’s an intriguing question to me because, having been an adult during Covid, I wonder whether it was different at a small-group level. One of the things is that humans are not great at either giving or receiving social support in general. It's really hard to get it right, even for the people closest to us. I think people are probably more at risk of getting social support wrong. We're not very good at knowing what to ask for support, in any case. 

The APA released its survey called Stress in America last year. The uncertainty around AI was one stressor. But the biggest stressor was loneliness and the APA recommended that people reach out and build a social network. But you're saying, that may not help.

Let me make some key distinctions here. Having people that you can count on turns out to be absolutely critical. Do you have someone in your life who if something goes wrong, you can kind of call no matter what the hour is? If you don't have anyone, that's devastating and frankly unsafe. We don't necessarily know what we need. The third component is that we end up often feeling guilty and like we're a burden and like we shouldn't be asking for that kind of support. 

You’ve also discussed that under uncertainty people have trouble maintaining a sense of meaning in their lives, that uncertainty affects their sense of coherence.  

If you dig into the psychological research you find that one of the things that really helps us feel a sense of meaning is having things in our life to be coherent and sensibly ordered. If you ask someone “What's the meaning of your life?”  they're not going to answer, “Well, it's the fact that my day is very organized and scheduled,” but research shows that if we have more structure, that does give us a sense of meaning. Even if we see a series of pictures in order of the seasons as opposed to out of order, is one interesting example. 

If you were presented with someone who, for example, might lose his or her job to AI, what specific steps might help that person either minimize the uncertainty or realize the adaptive benefits of uncertainty? 

The first is to ask, is there actually anything that you could do to, you know, prevent the problem from occurring? As we talked about, this is the upside of worry. If you've kind of run that mental checklist and you're out of ideas, and there's nothing you can do to actually change the future, a second step you can think through is, is there anything I can do to prepare? What would I need to do to be able to kind of cope with that outcome?  And so you can get your ducks in a row. 

Tell me about preemptive benefit-finding, which is contemplating the worst possible outcome and thinking about the upside. 

I call it predemption just because preemptive benefit-finding turns out to be a bit of a mouthful. We know from decades of research that when people experience trauma, if there's some silver lining to this terrible thing that happened, it tends to be associated with better outcomes. I ended up doing a bunch of studies on this idea. My most surprising finding in all of my research was from a study with women undergoing a breast biopsy. I threw in this question saying, “Can you imagine any good that might come, any silver lining, if you have breast cancer?” Right around 75 percent of women said “I'd be a stronger person,” “I'd be a role model for my daughters,” “I would get closer to my family,” “I'd appreciate my life more.”  All these beautiful things they expressed. 

That was kind of our first hint that there's something here. We ended up doing experimental work with other kinds of waiting periods — waiting for election results, waiting for news of a health problem in the lab. People who engage in that kind of thinking feel better while they're waiting, and in fact, feel better if they get that news. It seems to be a pretty powerful mental trick. 

Explore these other Uncertainty Boom interviews:

Jill Lepore, the Harvard historian, talks about her new book examining how technology is affecting our liberal democracy. To read the interview on the Aventine Substack page, click here. To read on the Aventine website, click here. 

Jack Nitschke, a clinical psychologist and neuroscientist, discusses uncertainty’s effect on our brains and why it makes us less prepared for the future. Click here for Substack, here for Aventine.org.  

George W. Casey, a retired four-star US Army general, discusses leadership under uncertainty and the lessons he learned taking over the multinational force in Iraq in 2004. Click here for Substack, click here for Aventine.org.

Nicholas Bloom, an economist at Stanford University who is one of leading researchers on economic uncertainty, what it is and how it affects companies, countries, investors and consumers.