Beware Of Feeling Certain

It seems that the more complex the world becomes, and the more labyrinthine our social problems, the more confident we are that our simplistic perspectives contain revealed truth. Certainty is an emotional state, not an intellectual one. To feel certain, we must filter out much more information than we can process. The more we shut out and ignore, the more likely we are to be wrong. It's extremely difficult to know something and extremely easy to think we know.

Fear of ambiguity and uncertainty in our ambiguous and uncertain world traps us in myopic close-mindedness. How we cope with uncertainty determines how well we do in life. If we can tolerate it, uncertainty drives us to discover more. It can make us smarter and more compassionate. Similarly, doubt is insidious when we deny it but invaluable when it motivates learning. When it motivates learning, judgment comes at the end of the reasoning process, not before it. One of the most lamentable of lost virtues is reserving judgment.

Psychologist Daniel Kahneman showed us that we think we have reasons for our judgments, when in fact we judge first and then look for reasons to justify the judgment. Feelings drive judgments about whether facts are important, relevant, illuminating, misleading, or fake. Discussions of facts that ignore or dismiss feelings come off as arrogant, if not hostile and gaslighting. Feelings are always valid, even when the assumptions and judgments that underlie them are inaccurate or false.

When I started my practice, more than forty years ago, I thought that feelings of certainty were antithetical to resentment. I naively thought that if we felt genuinely certain, we wouldn't be resentful. It didn’t take long in my practice to learn that feelings of certainty and resentment go together. People who feel certain tend to resent those who disagree with them. More to the point, they feel certain because they’re resentful; resentment is a feeling of certainty, another defense against doubt and vulnerability.

You can test this hypothesis by thinking of something you resent, which means you’ve made a negative judgment about certain people. And then try to see the people you're judging from their perspectives and appreciate what it's like for them. This won't be easy because judgments shape perceptions. A sense of entitlement is another way to ward off feelings of uncertainty. Entitlement is about superiority, not fairness or justice; the more entitled we feel, the less regard we have for other people’s rights. Entitlement is easy to see in others but nearly impossible to perceive in ourselves, without deliberate reflection. 

The questions we must ask ourselves: Are my rights and privileges impinging on anyone else's? Self-awareness requires sensitivity both to our internal experience and the effects of our behavior on others. Self-obsession is a preoccupation with our internal experience, while being oblivious to the negative effects our behavior has on others. We’re all self-obsessed when experiencing strong feelings, when it's difficult to see other people’s perspectives and, consequently, the effects of our behavior on them. We tend to judge other people by their negative reactions to us, without seeing what they’re reacting to. That's the brain on autopilot. But we can train it to withhold judgment until we see other perspectives.

We enrich our lives when we achieve the difficult but laudable goal of withholding judgment until we fully understand other perspectives. Considering evidence against our assumptions illuminates blind spots and dispels illusions of certainty. We must be more curious and less judgmental. For a hopeful life, ambiguity and uncertainty must stimulate learning and appreciation, not knee-jerk responses.

-Psychology Today