You know when a complicated problem arises, or a relationship or job or phase in your life ends, and you can’t wrap it up all tidy and fresh with a big shiny bow of order and clarity? I hate that. A lot of people hate that. It means things aren’t all simple and easy, but have now been rendered murky and uncategorizable (made-up word!) by the shape-shifting forces of ambiguity. It is ambiguous. Is there a more lovely, confounding word? It has a prickly, complex beauty, but it’s the sort you’d rather admire in a museum than in your actual life. So how to deal with it? It’s not as bad as you think.
But hey, why are we so bad at dealing with ambiguity? Because the world is ambiguous, and our survival has long depended on installing a sense of order to beat back the chaos of nature. Rules, religion, systems, infrastructure, science, hierarchies — it all helps us to make orderly what is ultimately irrational: us, i.e., nature. Unresolved things = not cool!
But people who have a high need for lightning-fast closure in processing information, new research says, tend to be more likely to make snap decisions, to be rigid in their thinking or to ignore alternate opinions once they’ve made up their minds. They also tend to be less creative. They are, in short, more close-minded, because they dont’ want to sit around waiting on an organic resolution.
But here’s the thing: Good thinkers are comfortable with ambiguity. Remember that thing F. Scott Fitzgerald said? “The test of a first rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.” Yup. What he said.
Also, what these people said: Scholars at the University of Toronto have supported their hypothesis that people who read short stories are more comfortable with ambiguity. Less in need of “cognitive closure.” Less likely to rush to judgment. You know, better people.
Vindication for bookworms everywhere! They had 100 students read an essay or a story, answering statements before and after about how much they agreed or disagreed with ideas like, “I don’t like situations that are certain” or “I dislike questions that can be answered in many different ways.”
The short story readers won the day:
Compared with peers who have just read an essay, they expressed more comfort with disorder and uncertainty—attitudes that allow for both sophisticated thinking and greater creativity. “Exposure to literature,” the researchers write in the Creativity Research Journal, “may offer a (way for people) to become more likely to open their minds.”
The reasoning is pretty simple: Short stories offer the rare chance to imagine the perspective of different people in a variety of situations in a safe environment. If done well, the stories allow you to seamlessly inhabit their head space, thus broadening your capacity for understanding their choices, their impulses, their motives — other/multiple viewpoints that are not your own. And usually, minus the very tidy, contrived endings and resolutions we are so accustomed to on TV and movies (there are obviously exceptions).
Even when the characters are totally despicable!
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
