What is The Psychology of Ambiguity?
Imagine standing before a piece of abstract art. It's something jagged, shifting, almost unsettling. You stare, searching for meaning, for firm ground to stand on, yet the image refuses to resolve. Is it beautiful? Is it grotesque? You don't know. That ephemeral sense, that deep pang of uncertainty, is ambiguity in action.
Ambiguity is not just about lacking information; it's about being suspended between interpretations, caught between knowing and not knowing, feeling and not feeling.
And while our instinct is to resolve it as quickly as possible, ambiguity has a far deeper role in shaping how we think, decide, and experience the world.
Before we can explore this deeper psychology of ambiguity, let's first define it. It feels a bit like an oxymoron: define a concept which, at its core, is the antithesis of definition and clarity.
What is ambiguity? At the level of psychology, ambiguity is the feeling we get when we don't know what we're experiencing, or how we should feel about it. It’s an experience or an encounter for which you have no suitable, existing template. Ambiguity is more than mystery or doubt or confusion. Instead, ambiguity is a state of being utterly dumbfounded by something - not just not knowing what something is, but not even knowing how to feel about it.
So what does ambiguity do? How does ambiguity influence our psychology?
The Psychology of Ambiguity and Its Influence
When it comes to ambiguity, there's some good news and there's some bad news. First, the bad news. The bad news about ambiguity is, unfortunately, really bad: ambiguity kills. It's a state of confusion, and a sentiment that reliably signals threat and risk. Ambiguity is the absolute last thing we want to encounter when we're driving 70 miles on the highway, or when we're walking alone at night down an unfamiliar street.
Because of its inherent danger, the human brain is essentially an ambiguity assassin, on a dedicated mission to destroy it, wherever it lies. Ambiguity aversion is broad, and it has a significant impact, for example, on the decisions we make about money. Research consistently shows that people are hardwired to be loss averse. That is, losing $20 stings far more than gaining $20 feels rewarding. Because of this, we tend to avoid taking risks that could lead to losses, especially when large sums of money are on the line.
People don't like losing money - no surprise there. What's most intriguing is that our aversion isn't just to risk - it's to ambiguity itself. When faced with a choice, we reliably opt for a known risk over an unknown one, even when the unknown risk might actually be lower. Here, as in many scenarios, ambiguity is a harm in and of itself.
Ambiguity and The Need for Closure
And this aversion to ambiguity isn't just a mild preference, it's a visceral rejection. We go to extreme lengths to eliminate uncertainty. In one particularly unsettling study, UK researchers created a scenario akin to stumbling upon a snake in the wild. Participants were seated, hooked up to electric shock devices, and given a grim choice: they could either press a button to deliver a guaranteed electric shock to themselves or sit in uncertainty, not knowing if a shock would come at all.
The result? No hesitation. Participants overwhelmingly chose the certainty of pain over the ambiguity of waiting. That's how much we despise ambiguity. When given the choice between the unknown and an electric shock, we choose the shock.
Whatever life throws at us, we naturally want to feel as certain as possible. This tendency is what psychologists call "Need for Closure": the drive to have definite answers rather than sustaining confusion or ambiguity, to lock down an interpretation quickly rather than remaining open to multiple possibilities. It's the psychological urgency to escape the discomfort of not knowing by settling on any answer, even if it might be wrong. Find yourself squinting into that piece of modern art, unsure about what you're looking at? Your brain won't let you bask in this perceptual uncertainty for long - it'll pick a stable interpretation, and that's that.
Ambivalent towards a colleague, and uncertain if you like them or not? That feeling will gnaw at you until you decide for good if they're friend or foe. As with all things ambiguous, either is fine, but there's no room to rest in between.
Ambiguity is designed to feel unnerving and uncomfortable - it's our brains trying to protect us from the dangerous unknown.
The Psychological Advantages of Ambiguity
But here's what we miss when we rush to eliminate ambiguity: it lies at the core of some of our most vaulted experiences.
Ambiguous experiences and feelings - those which we can’t quite pin down or fully comprehend - are the raw material of our most profound and transformative moments; those encounters that expand rather than confirm what we thought we knew about the world. The feeling of overwhelming awe looking up at a giant redwood. A peculiar sense of serendipity when a set of events feels too good to transpire by chance. Wonder, whim, and a childlike curiosity. When you peel back a layer on any of these scenarios and encounters, you come face to face with an experience which is ambiguous - uncategorizable into our current understanding.
What makes these experiences so powerful is precisely their resistance to easy categorization. Awe emerges when we encounter something so vast or complex that our existing mental frameworks can't contain it - we're suspended in that liminal space between comprehension and incomprehension. Wonder thrives in the gap between question and answer. Even falling in love involves surrendering to the beautiful ambiguity of not knowing exactly what this feeling is or where it will lead. The very experiences that make life feel meaningful and rich are those that resist our brain's categorizing, certainty-seeking machinery.
Our orientation towards mystery and otherness comes down to ambiguity.
The Nuances of Ambiguity, Uncertainty & Risk
Here's where the story gets more complex. Ambiguity has its good, its bad, and its gray.
Ambiguity has developed a reputation for being intrinsically aversive - something we naturally recoil from like a hot stove. But this isn't quite right. Ambiguity itself isn't the villain; it's ambiguity coupled with risk that sends us into psychological overdrive.
Consider the difference between two scenarios. In the first, you're invited onto a game show where you spin a wheel, and depending on where it lands, you win anywhere between $50 and $500. The outcome is completely uncertain - pure ambiguity - but as the wheel spins, what you feel isn't dread but pleasurable anticipation. Now imagine a slightly different scenario: the same wheel, but now some segments show losses up to $500. Suddenly, that spinning wheel transforms from exciting to anxiety-inducing. The ambiguity hasn't changed, but its emotional texture has completely inverted.
This distinction is crucial. Our aversion to ambiguity isn't really about the unknown itself - it's about the potential for negative outcomes lurking within that unknown. As the research shows, participants given a 50% chance of being shocked experience more stress than those guaranteed a shock. But flip the valence - make it a 50% chance of winning a prize - and that same uncertainty becomes energizing rather than paralyzing.
This has profound implications for how we navigate modern life. The business world, like the ocean, contains both opportunity and peril, often intertwined in ways we can't immediately parse. A startup opportunity might be the next unicorn or a spectacular failure. A bold presentation might launch your career or damage your reputation. The ambiguity itself isn't the problem - it's our inability to separate the uncertainty from the threat.
This presents a massive challenge to how we learn and accumulate insight. The world doesn't neatly divide into "risky ambiguity" and "safe ambiguity." Most of life exists in a gray zone where we don't know if the uncertainty contains risk or reward. This meta-ambiguity - uncertainty about the uncertainty itself - is perhaps the most challenging psychological territory of all.
Our brains, those pattern-seeking prediction machines, desperately want to categorize each ambiguous situation as either threatening or benign. But the world resists such tidy classification. The same ocean that provides food can swallow ships whole. The same market volatility that creates fortunes can destroy them. The challenge isn't eliminating ambiguity or even just "embracing" it - it's developing the psychological flexibility to engage with ambiguity on its own terms, without immediately coding it as a threat.
This nuanced understanding transforms how we might approach ambiguity in our own lives. Instead of seeing our discomfort with uncertainty as a weakness to overcome, we can recognize it as an adaptive signal that helps us allocate our psychological resources wisely. The executive who eats the same breakfast every day isn't exhibiting rigidity - they're creating a predictable foundation that frees up cognitive resources for navigating the unpredictable. The entrepreneur who maintains stable personal relationships isn't risk-averse - they're creating an emotional base camp from which to venture into professional uncertainty.
Final Thoughts on Ambiguity
Responding to ambiguity has always been important, but its significance has grown immensely in the modern era. As we spend more time in the digital world, our daily experiences are increasingly screened for anything that feels new, unintuitive, or uncomfortable - making us more of who we already were, more convinced of what we already think, and less available to new perspectives. Our algorithmic bubbles promise to minimize ambiguity, serving us exactly what we expect, when we expect it. But in doing so, they may be atrophying our capacity to engage productively with the unknown.
Meanwhile, political polarization increasingly saps our appetite for nuance and conversation, replacing it with a mode of thinking that is heavily binary, tribalistic, and ambiguity-free. Every issue must have a clear right and wrong side, every person must be sorted into ally or enemy, every situation must be immediately categorized as safe or threatening. Overall, developing the right orientation to ambiguity has never been more challenging or more important.
The more we try to eliminate ambiguity from our lives, the more vulnerable we become to it. Like muscles that weaken without resistance, our psychological capacity for uncertainty atrophies without practice. The solution isn't to seek out chaos or deliberately make our lives uncertain. Instead, it's to recognize ambiguity as an inescapable feature of existence - as natural and necessary as breathing - and to develop practices that help us engage with it skillfully rather than reflexively.
Photo by Mayur Deshpande on Unsplash
If you're curious about the psychology of ambiguity and how it shapes our perceptions, decisions, and experiences, sign up for my newsletter. Each edition dives deeper into the fascinating ways our minds interpret the world - and how we can harness these insights to think and live better.
Be the first to read the next segment by signing up to the newsletter (for free)
References for The Psychology of Ambiguity and Uncertainty
Ruggeri, K., Alí, S., Berge, M. L., Bertoldo, G., Bjørndal, L. D., Cortijos-Bernabeu, A., ... & Folke, T. (2020). Replicating patterns of prospect theory for decision under risk. Nature human behaviour, 4(6), 622-633.
Ellsberg, Daniel (1961). Risk, Ambiguity, and the Savage Axioms. Quarterly Journal
of Economics, 75, 643-669
Ball, T. S., & Vogler, R. E. (1971). Uncertain pain and the pain of uncertainty. Perceptual and Motor Skills, 33(3_suppl), 1195-1203.
