In defense of doubt: Act of resistance in an age of bogus certainty

In an age where certainty is weaponized and ambiguity is treated as weakness, defending doubt may be one of the most democratic acts we have left.

When Donald Trump called Harvard a “radical recruitment center” and vowed to slash its research funding, I was alarmed — not just as a professor, but as someone who believes democracy depends on doubt.

As a professor of social psychology, I’ve spent two decades studying how people respond to uncertainty — and how those responses shape moral and political life. What I heard in Trump’s rhetoric — and in broader attacks on elite universities — wasn’t just hostility toward higher education. It was hostility toward ambiguity itself.

That may sound abstract, but it has real consequences. Climate change, artificial intelligence, migration, war — these are deeply complex challenges with no easy answers. Yet public discourse increasingly punishes hesitation and rewards certainty. Doubt is framed as weakness. Complexity, as betrayal.

Consider climate change: addressing it requires aligning national interests, economic incentives and public behavior — none of which submit to a simple fix. The same applies to AI governance, where ethical, technical and societal concerns clash. In migration policy, humanitarian principles collide with nationalist sentiment. Each of these domains resists binary thinking, yet debate flattens them into ideological fault lines.

This dynamic creates fertile ground for populism. Populist leaders don’t just offer solutions — they offer cognitive relief. They reduce systemic problems to moral clashes. They name enemies. They speak in absolutes: “You are right. They are wrong. I alone can fix it.” In moments of crisis, that clarity is intoxicating.

But the comfort comes at a cost. My research, and that of others in psychological science, shows that uncertainty creates emotional discomfort: anxiety, tension even paralysis. In response, people often seek “compensatory control”: the sense that there is order in the world, even if that order is imposed from above. This can lead people to embrace authoritarian leaders, conspiracy theories or absolutist ideologies — not because they’re irrational, but because they are trying to escape uncertainty.

Interestingly, compensatory strategies can take multiple forms. When ambivalence — the mental conflict of having mixed feelings — becomes too uncomfortable, people often cope by polarizing their attitudes on unrelated topics. In other words, the discomfort of holding two opposing views can spill over, pushing people to become more extreme elsewhere as a form of psychological compensation.

At the same time, certainty serves a powerful social identity function. Declaring a clear position, especially a strong one, signals belonging. If you know exactly where you stand, you know who your people are. Certainty is rewarded not just with clarity, but with community. Ambivalence, by contrast, is lonely. Few movements rally around moderation. People don’t take to the streets with signs that read: “It’s Complicated.”

Certainty becomes a badge of identity. It distinguishes “us” from “them.” And in this way, many public debates shift from reasoned exchange to tribal contest. Argument gives way to allegiance. The substance of a position matters less than the clarity with which it’s held.

This pattern spans the political spectrum. The content may differ — nationalism on the right, moral purity on the left — but the psychological function is strikingly similar: Certainty signals virtue, and doubt is mistaken for disloyalty. On the right, this can take the form of conspiracies or authoritarian nostalgia; on the left, it may manifest as moral purism or ideological litmus tests. In both cases, strong opinions offer identity, clarity and social rewards. The underlying mechanism is the same: In uncertain times, certainty sells — and it sells best when it comes with a sense of belonging.

This trend is supercharged by social media. Filter bubbles and algorithmic curation feed us opinions that reinforce our own, while posts that express moral clarity and outrage spread faster than those that express caution or doubt. Platforms reward emotional intensity, not nuance. Over time, this reshapes our expectations of what counts as persuasive, informed or intelligent.

That might explain why conspiracy theories spike during crises. When the world feels chaotic, a story — however false — that names culprits and draws lines of causality can feel more tolerable than the admission that many things are beyond our control.

And this is precisely why universities are being targeted.

Higher education, at its best, trains people to tolerate ambiguity. It rewards provisional thinking, revises conclusions and accepts that knowledge is always unfinished. At its best, higher education doesn’t just tolerate uncertainty — it cultivates it. In the sciences, this ideal is embedded in the Popperian method: Theories must be falsifiable, and progress comes not through confirming our beliefs, but by trying to disprove them. In the humanities and philosophy, figures like Socrates remind us that knowledge begins with recognizing the limits of our understanding. “I know that I know nothing,” he famously said — not as an admission of ignorance, but as a commitment to relentless questioning. This culture of intellectual humility — of testing, revising and learning — forms the core of what universities are meant to instill. That epistemic humility — the willingness to admit what we don’t know — is increasingly out of step with a public discourse that values performance over inquiry.

Start your day with essential news from Salon.
Sign up for our free morning newsletter, Crash Course.

Authoritarian leaders recognize this. Institutions that teach people to question, revise and reflect are dangerous to regimes that rely on narrative simplicity. That’s why they defund, discredit or discipline universities.

This isn’t just happening in the United States. In the Netherlands, where I live, the recently fallen right-wing populist government implemented sweeping budget cuts to higher education, as part of a broader agenda to diminish the role of universities in public life. Under the guise of defending national identity and fiscal prudence, these cuts threaten academic freedom and international collaboration. In Hungary, Viktor Orbán forced Central European University into exile. India’s government, under Narendra Modi, has tightened control over academic speech. In Argentina, President Javier Milei’s drastic budget cuts have sparked mass protests. Around the world, universities are being punished not for their politics, but for their independence.

This mistrust of ambiguity is not just a policy problem. It’s a psychological one. We live in an age of information abundance, yet emotional scarcity. When everything feels uncertain, clarity becomes a form of comfort — even if that comfort is false.

The craving for clarity is not limited to the political right. In progressive spaces, too, ideological purity often trumps complexity. Doubt and nuance are sometimes treated as signs of complicity or cowardice. This tribal certainty may differ in content, but not in structure.

On social media, we are rewarded for certainty and punished for doubt. Posts that express outrage, ridicule or moral clarity go viral; those that admit complexity or uncertainty vanish. We may scorn populist leaders for their absolutism, but we often engage in the same dynamic — endorsing takes that simplify, shaming those who hesitate, resharing content that flatters our tribe.

Algorithms amplify the effect. Platforms reward emotional intensity, not epistemic humility. Over time, this reshapes what counts as persuasive or intelligent.

Yet there is hope. In our own research, we found that people who felt a loss of control didn’t just turn to conspiracy theories or strongman figures. They also turned to belief in human progress — in science, in institutions, in our collective capacity to learn and adapt. In one study, participants who felt a lack of control expressed stronger belief in scientific and moral progress, and were more supportive of high-tech solutions to environmental challenges. That belief, ironically, depends on embracing uncertainty: the idea that we can change rests on the idea that things are not fixed.

Work I was involved in has shown that people who are dispositionally ambivalent — that is, who are more comfortable holding contradictory thoughts or feelings — are less prone to cognitive biases like the confirmation bias. Our experiments found they were more likely to consider disconfirming evidence, resist motivated reasoning and remain open to revising their views. In this way, doubt functions not only as an emotional buffer, but as a cognitive asset. It allows people to reason more carefully, evaluate claims more fairly and engage in more productive dialogue. These are precisely the habits that democratic societies require.

That is the radical promise of doubt. It’s not paralysis. It’s the engine of progress. Doubt makes science possible. It makes learning possible. And it makes democracy possible. Because in order to listen, to compromise, to revise, you first have to admit you don’t already have all the answers.

As John F. Kennedy once said: “The greater our knowledge increases, the greater our ignorance unfolds.”

And it’s a bitter irony that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. — formerly a leading anti-vaccine voice and now secretary of Health and Human Services — has already dismantled the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s vaccine advisory panel. This was not merely a political gesture. It is part of a broader effort to undermine the institutions that most embody provisional thinking — research, evidence, science — and replace them with a worldview that trades doubt for dogma.

As traditional institutions lose authority, they are often replaced not with better systems of knowledge, but with influencer-driven echo chambers. In such spaces, truth becomes a matter of tribe, not evidence — and doubt is not welcomed, but punished.

Yet if we defend science as a refuge for doubt, we must also look inward. In recent years, many researchers — including myself — have embraced the idea that science should serve society: combat climate change, reduce inequality, promote justice. These are noble aims. At the same time, universities themselves are not immune to the very pressures they seek to resist. In some cases, the pursuit of justice or clarity of mission has led to a narrowing of acceptable viewpoints — a trend that, ironically, undermines the openness and epistemic humility that science depends on. But when research becomes a vehicle for mission-driven advocacy, it risks shifting from inquiry to ideology. If we already know the answers we want to find, the process of asking becomes secondary. This not only erodes public trust, but undermines the very foundation of science: the important idea that knowledge is provisional, and even our most cherished assumptions are open to revision.

Defending doubt means resisting the urge to retreat into moral certainty, even on our own side. It means championing the messy, iterative process of learning, individually and collectively. It means demanding more of our public discourse than slogans and certitudes.

In an era of dangerous certainty, defending doubt is not a retreat. It is resistance.