Coping With Uncertainty

Actors in competitive environments are bound to decide and act under conditions of uncertainty because they rarely have accurate foreknowledge of how their opponents will respond and when they will respond. Just as a competitor makes a move to improve their standing on a given variable relative to a target competitor, she should expect the latter to counteract with an iterative lagged asymmetric response, that is, with a sequence of countermoves (iteration) that is very different in kind from its trigger (asymmetry) and that will be launched at some unknown point in the future (time lag). The paper explicates the broad relevance of the newly proposed concept of " iterative lagged asymmetric responses " to the social study of temporality and to fields as diverse as intelligence and counterintelligence studies, strategic management, futures studies, military theory, and long-range planning. By bringing out in the foreground and substantiating the observation that competitive environments place a strategic premium on surprise, the concept of iterative lagged asymmetric responses makes a contribution to the never-ending and many-pronged debate about the extent to which the future can be predicted.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1177/0961463X17752652

In this world it can be very difficult to feel safe and be free of anxiety. This is ok. Most of us find ways to cope with this background feeling that we cannot fully ignore by distracting ourselves from the root issue.... we are denying our right to be authentic with ourselves. What we feel is who we are at the moment.... and who we are is always changing. Emotional authenticity is more healing and effective than simply applying an emotional band-aid. What does this mean? .....

This study investigated how interaction with peers influenced the ways students managed uncertainty during collaborative problem solving in a fifth grade class. The analysis focused on peer responses to individuals’ attempts to manage uncertainty they experienced while engaged in collaborative efforts to design, build, and program robots and achieve assignment objectives. Patterns of peer response were established through discourse analysis of work sessions for five teams engaged in two collaborative projects. Three socially supportive peer responses and two unsupportive peer responses were identified. Peer interaction was influential because students relied on supportive social response to enact most of their uncertainty management strategies. This study provides a useful theoretical contribution to understanding the roles of peer interaction in collaborative problem solving. Conceptualizing collaborative problem solving as a process of negotiating uncertainties can help instructional designers shape tasks and relational contexts to facilitate learning.

Learning and dialogue may naturally engender feelings and expressions of uncertainty for a variety of reasons and purposes. Yet, little research has examined how patterns of linguistic uncertainty are enacted and changed over time as students reciprocally influence one another and the dialogical system they are creating. This study describes the occurrence of uncertainty expressions of graduate students collaborating in computer-mediated discussions to negotiate and construct understandings of new concepts from course readings. We report on how often uncertainty was expressed in online synchronous and asynchronous discussions and the characteristics of its expression. We also explore the antecedents and consequences of such expression. Findings indicate that students expressed uncertainty often and in many ways and that such expression seemed to be integrated in a dynamic system of influences on the conversation. We conclude that the ability to deal with and express uncertainty appropriately is an important skill in online academic contexts that may be related to the intellectual work of students in the process of appropriating the discourse of their academic disciplines as they make meaning of scholarly texts.

This study offers a systematic analysis of uncertainty in communication education by examining communication goals and challenges in the context of collaborative creative problem-solving in engineering assignments. Engineering design projects are seen as having the potential to help K-12 students learn to deal with uncertainty as well as a means through which to learn science and math. Educational researchers have emphasized the cognitive or very general social aspects of this context. The current investigation argues that collaborative, creative design work involves a distinctive constellation of communication challenges: ongoing efforts to temporarily suspend normal inclinations to understand well, to appraise what we understand, and to do so in relation to instrumental, identity, and relational meanings. This argument guides textual analyses of transcripts of fifth-graders assigned to groups tasked with designing and building an environmentally beneficial robot. Implications for communication education are discussed.