People more likely to trust if they can tolerate ambiguity.

 Can a new colleague be trusted with confidential information? Will she be a cooperative team player on a critical upcoming project? Assessing someone’s motives or intentions, which are often hidden, is difficult, and gauging how to behave toward others involves weighing possible outcomes and personal consequences.   New research published in Nature Communications indicates that individuals who are tolerant of ambiguity–a kind of uncertainty in which the odds of an outcome are unknown–are more likely to cooperate with and trust other people.   

What the researchers say: Tolerance of ambiguity is distinct from tolerance of risk. With risk, the probability of each future outcome is known, said the lead author of the study. The many unknowns inherent in social situations make them inherently ambiguous, and the study finds that attitudes toward ambiguity are a predictor of one’s willingness to engage in potentially costly social behavior.   

“If we consider how we go about navigating through our social worlds, we constantly need to figure out what other people are feeling and thinking,” the researchers said. “Even if someone tells us they are angry, they may not be telling us how angry they really are, or why they might be angry in the first place. In other words, we try to predict other people without ever having full access to their ‘hidden’ states.”   “Because we do not have full knowledge of others’ feelings or intentions, it can be hard to figure out whether it is best to trust another person with money or information, for example, or cooperate with them when one’s well-being is at stake,” they added.   That incomplete knowledge, she said, means “social exchanges are rife with ambiguous–and not risk –uncertainty: we can’t apply specific probabilities to how a social exchange might unfold when we don’t have certainty about whether the person has trustworthy intentions.”  

 In the study the team performed a series of experiments in which 200 volunteers (106 female and 94 male participants) first completed a solo gambling game to assess their risk and uncertainty tolerance. They then played social games in which they had to decide whether to cooperate with or trust other players. Cooperation potentially benefited both players, but cooperators risked being betrayed and losing out.   In one experiment, the results showed that ambiguity tolerance was positively correlated with the amount of cooperation. In a second study, the researchers found that those who could tolerate ambiguity chose to trust a partner even if they knew the person did not always behave in a trustworthy way in the past.   

Overall, being able to tolerate ambiguity predicted greater prosocial behavior, which prioritizes the welfare of other people and not just one’s own self-benefit. By contrast, there was no association between risk tolerance and social decision-making.   When subjects were allowed to gather information about others–through gossiping about, engaging with or observing another person, for instance–and reduce the amount of ambiguous uncertainty around their social choices, the link between ambiguity tolerance and willingness to trust disappeared, according to the study.   

“There are many questions this work made us think about, and we are currently conducting a number of experiments to explore this domain,” the lead researcher said. “As one example, we are trying to understand whether situations that have ambiguously uncertain outcomes influence how readily an individual will turn to their peers for guidance on how to behave. The more uncertain the environment, the more people might conform.”   

So, what? This is an important study because we are increasingly working with people whose social and cultural background is very different from our own. The social signals that are given off will be different—more ambiguous to us—to those of people who share more of our own social experiences and assumptions.   This, as the research indicates, places a burden on our ability to trust and to be adequately prosocial in our responses.   

What now? We have to be very clear as to what our needs are and to express them without ambiguity. If we use generalizations such as “client centric,” “team player,” “ASAP” etc. we must realize that we are increasing ambiguity because the expressions themselves are ambiguous and can mean different things to different people in different contexts. Add cultural diversity into the mix and you can have a fall-off in trust and collaboration—which is in fact what we are seeing in organizations as well as in society in general.