What difference is there between a group of people who read Franz Kafka, another who plays with a manipulated deck of cards in which the diamonds are red and the hearts are black, and another who ultimately did not receive any of these stimuli?
The degree of uncertainty and, apparently, by extension, his tendency to become more nationalistic, according to A study made by psychologists Travis Proulx and Daniel Randles.
Rejection of uncertainty
To assess how much uncertainty (a surreal story and manipulated letters) made people tend to seek order, they asked the three groups to look for patterns in a succession of random letters.
As the journalist explains Marta García Aller in his book The unpredictable. Everything that technology wants and cannot control:
Those who had read the surrealist story, like those who received manipulated letters, had a greater need for order and found patterns even where there were none, like someone who sees the face of the Virgin in a damp spot on the wall.
This tendency to seek order seems to be able to be extrapolated to politics as well.: An ideological position would therefore be sought that did not entail a high level of ambiguity, as suggested in another experiment that asked about political ideology:
And those who had been exposed to greater ambiguity expressed nationalist ideas more fervently. The ideology of each of the subjects did not matter, that is, it did not matter if they were left-wing or right-wing. These experiments concluded that, in situations of stress and uncertainty, we are more likely to polarize our lives.
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The news
When there is uncertainty, we become more nationalistic
was originally published in
Xataka Science
by
Sergio Parra
.