People are motivated for survival purposes to develop cognitive understandings of the world that are as accurate as possible. When their subjective sense of accurate understanding becomes strained (e.g., by unexpected events), people typically respond with an alerting response to the source of the uncertainty and they take some action to improve their state of knowledge. It is proposed that the most important source of a motivation for uncertainty reduction is one's potential failure to understand the relatively unchanging causes of events. When a person is uncertain about their ability to identify cause and effect relationships, it is expected to create doubt about one's perception of reality and one's ability to exercise effective control. The current research focuses on the concept of causal uncertainty beliefs. The experiments examine cognitive processes that are associated with causal uncertainty beliefs, and some of the motivational consequences of such beliefs. This research has important implications for understanding people's responses to adverse circumstances, the cognitive bases of human motivation, and individual differences in social information processing.
