Rm. Sorrentino et al., UNCERTAINTY ORIENTATION AND TRUST IN CLOSE RELATIONSHIPS - INDIVIDUAL-DIFFERENCES IN COGNITIVE STYLES, Journal of personality and social psychology, 68(2), 1995, pp. 314-327
Because coping with uncertainty is an important aspect of close relati
onships and is critical to issues of trust, the authors expected indiv
idual differences in uncertainty orientation to play a central role in
shaping people's representations of their relationships. For a 3-week
period, 77 couples completed a series of questionnaires and kept diar
ies on their interactions. As expected, certainty-oriented persons' ne
ed for cognitive closure resulted in either high or low trust for thei
r partners, whereas uncertainty-oriented persons typically attained on
ly a moderate level of trust. Several other measures indicated that ce
rtainty-oriented partners found their relationships most aversive unde
r moderate trust. Memory data indicated that certainty-oriented indivi
duals, but not uncertainty-oriented individuals, used conclusions abou
t trust as a heuristic for reconstructing the past in ways that mainta
ined cognitive clarity. Uncertainty orientation also combined with gen
der in many interesting ways.