Ambiguity tolerance

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Ambiguity tolerance (from the Latin ambiguitas "ambiguity", "double meaning " and tolerare "tolerate", "endure"), sometimes also referred to as uncertainty or uncertainty tolerance , is the ability to endure ambiguous situations and contradicting behavior. Ambiguity-tolerant people are able to perceive ambiguities , i.e. inconsistencies , culturally determined differences or ambiguous information that seems difficult to understand or even unacceptable , without reacting aggressively or evaluating them unilaterally negatively or - often in the case of culturally determined differences - unreservedly positive . The term plays an important role in various psychological and educational theories, especially in personality development (see also: Development of the self and patchwork of identities according to Heiner Keupp ) and social learning . Ambiguity tolerance is also a prerequisite for a person's intercultural competence . According to studies, it does not correlate with his formal level of education.

Depending on the author and theoretical orientation, the tolerance of ambiguity is seen as a personality trait or as a cognitive and perceptual process. They attribute psychoanalytic concepts to the so-called ego functions .

When situations or people appear unpredictable and uncontrollable, people with little tolerance for ambiguity feel stress and discomfort and tend to restore order and structure in their environment with simple and unreflective ideas or rule systems and a more linear way of thinking. The double bond theory sees an excess of ambiguities as the main cause of the development of schizophrenia .

Psychology and role theory

In 1949, the psychoanalyst and psychologist Else Frenkel-Brunswik defined ambiguity tolerance as a measurable ability of an individual to recognize the coexistence of positive and negative properties in one and the same object, and introduced the concept of ambiguity tolerance as “basic variables in emotional and cognitive orientation of an individual versus life ”. In her research on authoritarian personality , she noticed an ethnocentric bias in children and also found that “some individuals are more able to see positive and negative traits in their parents and feelings of love and hate towards the same person without too much fear or accepting conflict while others dramatized the parents' image as either entirely good or bad ”. According to her, the ability to recognize this coexistence is an important, emotional- cognitive personality variable. The " black and white thinking " after Frenkel Brunswik one extreme of ambiguity in tolerance. Maintaining this way of thinking requires the individual to close off aspects of reality that pose a threat to this “solution” of contradictions. Ambiguity tolerance should not, however, be confused with the broader field of emotional ambivalence , which it defines as the simultaneous presence in the individual of loving and hateful impulses related to the same object .

Ambiguity tolerance as a hypothetical construct of a personality trait exists when a person has found a balanced relationship between role expectations and role design and can thus tolerate role conflicts . For the person it is the ability to "acknowledge ambiguity and uncertainty and be able to bear it". However, this does not require that all contradictions have been resolved (then no tolerance for ambiguity would be required). Ambiguity tolerance is thus a personality construct in order to perceive contradictions, inconsistencies or ambiguous information situations in their complexity and to evaluate them positively. According to Stanley Budner, an ambiguitive situation is defined by the lack of sufficient evidence and characterized by novelty, complexity and unsolvability.

From the point of view of a homogeneous, global dimension, the ambiguity tolerance in the role concept relates to the relationship between mutual role expectations and mutual need satisfaction.

According to Budner and MacDonald, ambiguity in tolerant people react to ambiguitive stimuli with psychological discomfort. Ambiguity-tolerant people, on the other hand, not only tolerate these stimuli passively, but even have a need for them.

The inventory for measuring ambiguity tolerance (IMA-40) differentiates factor-analytically five dimensions of ambiguity tolerance or intolerance to seemingly unsolvable problems, social conflicts and role stereotypes as well as the image of parents and the openness to new experiences ( empirical knowledge ). If a person's tolerance for ambiguity is significantly weakened or not present, one speaks of so-called ambiguity tolerance deficit syndrome (ATDS). This applies, for example, to people who, if stimuli ( senses and sensations ) cannot be correctly interpreted and responded to with adequate reactions , prematurely put unreflected ideas into practice without careful planning and without careful planning.

In cognitive psychology , the construct of tolerance for ambiguity is not seen as a general personality trait, but rather as a content-related or area-specific construct. It is more of a controlling regulative of the processes of receiving, processing and storing information in contradicting situations, in order to use logical forms of coping with contradictions appropriately.

Tolerance towards ambivalence cannot generally be used to infer a tolerance towards all opposites. This means that from a tolerance of ambivalent feelings towards people it must not necessarily be concluded that an individual is also tolerant towards ambivalent logics of organizational principles . This concerns, for example, the personnel development of executives. It is assumed, however, that a transfer of the tolerances from different levels of ambivalence can be learned.

According to an evaluation of a large series of experiments by the psychologists Oriel FeldmanHall and Marc-Lluís Vives, there is no empirical positive correlation between tolerance for ambiguity and willingness to take risks. People who don't mind taking risks do not easily endure ambiguity, and vice versa.

Transcultural context

In a transcultural context , tolerance of ambiguity is understood as the endurance of contradictions and opposing expectations that can arise due to culturally conditioned differences and ambiguous information. Even in new, unstructured and difficult to control situations, people with a high tolerance for ambiguity are able to “accept deviations from normality or unexpected reactions and actions instead of perceiving them as threats” and thus remain able to act.

In adapting processes to a foreign cultural situation, an ambiguity may in lead to confusion tolerance.

Tolerance of Ambiguity in the History of Islam

Thomas Bauer explained in his book Die Kultur der Ambiguität (2011) that the culture of Islam was characterized by a tolerance of ambiguity well into the 19th century. This becomes clear, for example, from the fact that older Koran commentaries place several interpretations next to one another without presenting one of them as the "correct" one. The tolerance for ambiguity is also evident in the idea of ijtihad , which understands truth as a process and not as a dogma. From the middle of the 19th century, according to him, the western influence in the course of colonialism and the inferiority towards the west displaced the classical, ambiguity-tolerant culture of Islam.

Bauer is of the opinion that tolerance for ambiguity can be learned, for example by studying music, art, literature and poetry, since these are ambiguous and therefore require a tolerance for ambiguity.

See also

literature

  • Else Frenkel-Brunswik : Intolerance of Ambiguity as an Emotional and Perceptual Personality Variable. In: Journal of Personality 18, 1949, pp. 108-143.
  • Jack Reis: Ambiguity tolerance. Contributions to the development of a personality construct . Heidelberg 1997.
  • Lothar Krappmann : Sociological Dimensions of Identity. Structural conditions for participating in interaction processes . Stuttgart 1969.
  • Georg Müller-Christ and Gudrun Weßling: Dealing with contradictions, tolerance of ambivalence and ambiguity. A model link. In: Georg Müller-Christ, Lars Arndt and Ina Ehnert (eds.): Sustainability and contradictions: A management perspective. Lit Verlag, July 2007, ISBN 978-3-8258-0614-9 , pp. 180-197 ( PDF; 373 kB ).

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Adrian Furnham and Tracy Ribchester: Tolerance of Ambiguity: A Review of the Concept, Its Measurement and Applications. In: Current Psychology: Developmental, Learning, Personality, Social. 14, 1995, pp. 179-199.
  2. ↑ Frenkel-Brunswik, 1949, p. 115.
  3. ↑ Georg Müller-Christ and Gudrun Weßling: Dealing with contradictions, tolerance of ambivalence and ambiguity. P. 185.
  4. ↑ Friedrich Dorsch: Dorsch Psychological Dictionary , p. 31.
  5. ↑ Stanley Budner: Intolerance of ambiguity as a personality variable. In: Journal of Personality. 30, 1962, pp. 29-50. doi : 10.1111 / j.1467-6494.1962.tb02303.x
  6. ^ AP MacDonald: Revised Scale for Ambiguity Tolerance: Reliability and Validity. In: Psychological Reports. 26, 1970, pp. 791-798.
  7. ↑ Wolfgang Streitbörger: Courage to Ambiguity , SWR2 Knowledge from June 7, 2019, accessed June 10, 2019
  8. ↑ Barbara Hatzer and Gabriel Layers: Intercultural Action Competence . In: Alexander Thomas, Eva-Ulrike Kinast and Sylvia Schroll-Machl (eds.): Handbook Intercultural Communication and Cooperation, Volume 1: Basics and fields of practice. Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 2005, pp. 138–148.
  9. ↑ Researcher on the Islamic debate: "No religion has to be compatible with the Basic Law". In: RP online. May 9, 2016. Retrieved November 5, 2017 .
  10. ↑ Rachid Boutayeb: The Revolution of Dignity and the End of Secularism. (No longer available online.) In: ifa-Edition Culture and Foreign Policy. At the turn of an era - Europe, the Mediterranean and the Arab world. Bernd Thum / Institute for Foreign Relations (ifa), archived from the original on April 17, 2016 ; Retrieved May 29, 2016 . Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. Pp. 90-95. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.ifa.de
  11. ↑ Frank Griffel: History of Tolerance: A Reformation in Islam is pointless. Süddeutsche Zeitung, May 27, 2016, accessed on May 29, 2016 .
  12. ↑ Ambiguity is a grace of God. Conversation with the Islamic scholar Thomas Bauer about tolerance for ambiguity in Muslim history. (No longer available online.) Zeitzeichen, March 4, 2016, archived from the original on May 29, 2016 ; Retrieved May 29, 2016 .
  13. ↑ Wolfgang Streitbörger: Ambiguity tolerance: learning to live with ambiguity. In: Deutschlandfunk Kultur. January 8, 2020, accessed January 8, 2020 .