Uncertainty Orientation and Trust in Close Relationships: Individual Differences in Cognitive Styles

Because coping with uncertainty is an important aspect of close relationships and is critical to issues of trust, the authors expected individual 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 diaries on their interactions. As expected, certainty-oriented persons' need for cognitive closure resulted in either high or low trust for their partners, whereas uncertainty-oriented persons typically attained only a moderate level of trust. Several other measures indicated that certainty-oriented partners found their relationships most aversive under moderate trust. Memory data indicated that certainty-oriented individuals, but not uncertainty-oriented individuals, used conclusions about trust as a heuristic for reconstructing the past in ways that maintained cognitive clarity. Uncertainty orientation also combined with gender in many interesting ways.