Is COVID-Induced Uncertainty Making Us More Radical?

If there is a word that would sum up the last one and a half years perfectly, it may be "uncertainty." Even in those sometimes short, sometimes longer, periods, when life seemed to return to normal, there was always a sense of uncertainty of how long this would last. There still is. It is difficult to plan ahead even to next month, let alone to the next holiday trip.

At the same time, the already significant distance between different ends of the political spectrum has become even more significant. Society has been fairly polarised for a long time, but polarisation has recently become quite extreme. There is no shortage of explanations for this, from the media landscape to the influence of Twitter and Facebook. But it seems that there is a less obvious explanation—namely, the link between political polarization and what social psychologists call "intolerance of uncertainty."

Intolerance of uncertainty is a measure, much like the self-control measure or the measure of introversion/extroversion. Some people are OK with uncertainty. Others, not so much. If you fill out a questionnaire where you have to say how much you agree with claims like “Unlike me, others always seem to know where they are going with their lives,” “I always want to know what the future has in store for me,” or “I can’t stand being taken by surprise,” this gives you an intolerance of uncertainty score.

Social psychologists and emotion researchers have worked with this intolerance of uncertainty score for a long time. However, new research shows an unexpected connection between the intolerance of uncertainty and political polarisation. The crucial finding is that people on both ends of the political spectrum are more likely to react to political content in a polarised manner if they score high on the intolerance of uncertainty questionnaire. Watching a clip of heated political debate led to more political polarisation regardless of which side you were on. But the higher your intolerance of uncertainty score is, the more likely you were to react in a polarised manner.

These findings are not at all surprising in the context of another paradigm in social psychology, the so-called Terror Management Theory. The main claim of Terror Management Theory is that confronting the possibility of one's mortality makes one rely more on their meaning-giving worldview. And as this meaning-giving worldview is very often a religious or political one, this leads to more radical views. Of course, the COVID-19 pandemic did both: confront us with our mortality as well as present us with a lot of uncertainties.

What is remarkable about the intolerance of uncertainty findings is that it points to a potentially important trigger of the political polarisation that we experience today that is completely content-free. It may not be the opposite camp's views on vaccines or masks that make us distance ourselves from them even more; instead, it may be the mere uncertainty of not knowing what will happen tomorrow.