UNCERTAINTY ORIENTATION AND TRUST IN CLOSE RELATIONSHIPS - INDIVIDUAL-DIFFERENCES IN COGNITIVE STYLES

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.