Why we love answers
It's also a comfort blanket of the virtual world
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“As human beings, not only do we seek resolution, but we also feel that we deserve resolution. However, not only do we not deserve resolution, we suffer from resolution. We don't deserve resolution; we deserve something better than that. We deserve our birthright, which is the middle way, an open state of mind that can relax with paradox and ambiguity.”
- Pema Chödrön
American Tibetan Buddhist monk, Pema Chödrön’s prose above succinctly captures the reverence we place on our pathological quest for answers. We feel entitled to a resolution because without the perceived permanence of finality and closure, we feel robbed of a tangible end to whatever issue or experience we might be confronting. The truest form of wisdom and value, she says, is living a life that revels in both the known and the unknown. But sustaining such an equanimous relationship to reality isn’t a strong suit for us homosepians, because we almost instinctively crave closure, and unsurprisingly so.
Closure provides sense of comforting stability in an otherwise chaotic world of ups and downs - an alluring warmth that lends her nurturing embrace and reassures us of our sanity. The world isn’t a crazy place after all.
Our lifelong dogged pursuit for order and certainty is to an extent a key contributor to social polarisation and division (but more on that later). In fact it is our yearning for certainty that translates into an obsession for neat categories, labels and coherent narratives. Good vs bad. Honourable vs deplorable. Cantankerous vs affable. Left vs right. We don’t like messiness and nuance. Things need to fit uniformly and predictably within our conception of reality. It is metaphorically similar to the nagging compulsion you have to let someone know that they have a bit of last-night’s dinner stuck between their teeth. No? Just me then?
Our desire for cognitive closure has been theorised to death. I’m however particularly interested in our response to ambiguity and uncertainty; how we spontaneously and almost unproblematically construct plausible explanations, answers and accounts, that resonate with us even if these resolutions have more than a whiff of personal bias about them.
Some of these resolutions are so solidified within the realms of our psyche that it shapes how we view people, communities and institutions. It becomes a hegemonic worldview (to us) and a comparative baseline for everything else that happens around us. One doesn’t have to look beyond social media to notice these trends.
As I write this, Facebook has just launched a nationwide ban in Australia on news media pages. This was a consequence of a proposed media bargaining legislation to make big-tech corporations pay media organisations for content. Channeling my inner geekiness, I sought to understand the variety of ‘closed narratives’ (and closure) that could possibly come out from this event, specifically on Twitter. Where would our thirst for concrete explanations and answers land us on this issue?
I scraped data from over 500 tweets labelled with the trending hashtag #facebooknewsban and then thematically analysed them through a customised software. Tweets from mainstream media organisations and official institutions were removed from the sample as I was more interested in what ordinary people were saying on this issue - people without any professional or institutional obligation to be objective or partisan. The results were interesting.
479 tweets were partisan in some form; either blaming Facebook, blaming the handling of the proposed legislation or taking its side. 21 tweets featured neutral stances, not explicitly subscribing to any view. I’ve attached a few samples.
Let’s start with a few that seemed to be proponents of a specific side surrounding the ban. They fell on a spectrum between expressing overt support for a particular view to a more measured and less fanatical reaction.
And finally that rare moment of neutrality:
95% of the tweets analysed were espousing the views of a particular side in this entire debacle. As mentioned before, I’m less interested in what side they were on than the fact that a particular side, solution or narrative was favoured over a more neutral stance. This absence of interpretive nuance however isn’t surprising on social media but it is important to ask why there is a strong resolve amongst humans in general to seek quick, concrete and somewhat tangible solutions, even in circumstances when none are forthcoming1.
The issue of corporatised information and information flows has been a systemic ‘wicked problem’ for decades and one that has threatened to boil over several times before. It involves a myriad of entrenched industry and non-industry related practices and grey policy areas, some more obscure than others. Social media as a platform provides a really conducive environment to seek and associate with specific closed narratives and ideologies. In a previous essay, I referred to it as an ideological echo chamber.
Maintaining a position of neutrality and levelheadedness is also challenging when media reports lure us into assuming one position over another, providing us with very little choice on the matter. In fact, these sensationalised narratives are deliberately framed to evoke an outpouring of emotion and vehement support for a specific stance. The commodity sold to you by the media isn’t the story but rather the promise of finality - that last and final stand on a matter that you must know about. Because there is nothing better than a complete narrative to justify your anger, sadness, disgust or even contempt to an unfolding situation.
I find that the need for cognitive closure does often involve closing in on evidence we want to see or have seen, leading to a biased view that detracts from any objective assessment of the situation. Additionally, it can also sometimes impose causal explanations for events and issues that, by virtue of their complexity, resist any single account. Most evident to me is how any closure demands a categorisation of key actors, practices and attitudes into neat wholesome little boxes. These boxes are rarely misshaped, worn or augmented in any way - they represent an array of neatly cut-out finite representations of reality.
Perhaps our relentless pursuit for narrative and cognitive closure arises from a deeply embedded primordial instinct for self-preservation and control; the idea that if we cut a slice of reality and contain it within a petri dish of very specific details and fact, we will ultimately determine the perimeters of observation. Slicing reality and subscribing to particular ideas over others provides us with the impression that we are actively engaging with life’s inevitable outcomes. Maybe we are inwardly hoping (praying) for a serendipitous moment of clarity akin to Alexander Fleming’s famous accident in discovering penicillin. More often than not however (with the exception of Mr Fleming’s exploits), chasing answers obscures your view of the bigger picture for the price of momentary and fleeting satisfaction. It quells the appetite but doesn’t eradicate the hunger - that unappeasable urge to know, define, complete and categorise.
A 2020 survey conducted by Julia Gärtner found that aspiring medical students who exhibited a higher propensity towards forms of cognitive closure were statistically more likely to struggle in gaining acceptance to medical school as they were more attuned towards maladaptive perfectionism and were significantly less tolerant of ambiguity. Whilst the study isn’t necessarily generalisable to all human behaviour, it does assert that when the stakes are high (e.g. having a terminal illness or facing a crucial test of any sort), people go into an overdrive quest for answers because it sets up an illusion of control over how things pan out.
Maybe certainty and closure isn’t a safety blanket as such but an evolutionary mechanism to manage our ‘closeness’ to the issue at hand. Knowing that there is a narrative or explanation wrapped around an issue provides an illusory sense of comfort that it is contained and hence less likely to overwhelm. However be warned that our quest for answers is often part of a continuous self-reinforcing loop - one that force-fits retrofitted explanations to a situation that we may not necessarily know enough about.
Perhaps the world is a crazy place filled with uncertainties but we’re just very good at (repeatedly) convincing ourselves that it isn’t.
A quick non-scientific scan of my Twitter feed today (5 days after the Facebook news ban was announced) indicates that most people have resorted to posting funny memes on the situation. Whilst, no where near in numbers to tweets that propose or seek answers, it does raise an interesting question on the role of humour in quenching our thirst for answers. Maybe something to ponder upon for another essay!