ReviewNature human behaviour2019
Resolving uncertainty in a social world.
Review in Nature human behaviour, 2019. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 84 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
84 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- Learning under social versus nonsocial uncertainty: A meta-analytic approach.Human brain mapping · 2022Pooled it
- Why are you looking at me like that? Intolerance of uncertainty and emotional face processing in social anxiety disorder.NeuroImage. Clinical · 2026Article
- Loneliness is linked to reduced calibration of confidence to uncertainty in social decision-making.Cognitive, affective & behavioral neuroscience · 2026Article
- Uncertainty of Reported Behavior Dynamics and Its Relationship to Socio-Political Ideologies and Affiliation.Entropy (Basel, Switzerland) · 2026Article
- Affective valence as a computational signal for learning value.Communications psychology · 2026Article
- Escape into Social Media? A 4-Week Tracking Study on Nomophobia and Smartphone Coping.Healthcare (Basel, Switzerland) · 2026Article
- Understanding How Athletes Manage Uncertainty in Sport.Behavioral sciences (Basel, Switzerland) · 2026Article
- Selective observation following betrayal shapes the social inference landscape.PLoS computational biology · 2026Article
- Transdiagnostic mental health symptom dimensions predict use of flexible model-based inference in complex environments.Translational psychiatry · 2026Article
- Analysis of factors alleviating the psychological anxiety of transfer students in postgraduate re-exam based on structural equation model.Frontiers in psychology · 2026Article
- Psychological uncertainty in human experience and behavior: a systematic review on measurements, induction, and effects.Frontiers in psychology · 2026Review
- Neural Dynamics of Social Cognition: A Single-Trial Computational Analysis of Learning Under Uncertainty.Human brain mapping · 2026Article
- Impression management in distributive justice: balancing fairness and social perception.Frontiers in psychology · 2026Article
- Decision-Making in Repeated Games: Insights from Active Inference.Behavioral sciences (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Review
- Measuring transparency in intelligent robots.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Advantageous and disadvantageous inequality aversion can be taught through learning of others' preferences.eLife · 2025Article
- Human Mentalizing as Rational Probabilistic Inference.Computational brain & behavior · 2025Article
- Navigating the Unknown: Mental Pain, Uncertainty, and Self-Isolation in Bali and Java.Culture, medicine and psychiatry · 2025Article
- Risk behind the veil of ambiguity: Decision-making under social and nonsocial sources of uncertainty.Risk analysis : an official publication of the Society for Risk Analysis · 2025Article
- Internal uncertainty impacts social information use in risky choice across adolescence.Communications psychology · 2025Article
24 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
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Authors and funding
2 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Consider the range of social behaviours we engage in every day. In each case, there are a multitude of unknowns, reflecting the many sources of uncertainty inherent to social inference. We describe how uncertainty manifests in social environments (the thoughts and intentions of others are largely hidden, making it difficult to predict a person's behaviour) and why people are motivated to reduce the aversive feelings generated by uncertainty. We propose a three-part model whereby social uncertainty is initially reduced through automatic modes of inference (such as impression formation) before more control-demanding modes of inference (such as perspective-taking) are deployed to narrow one's predictions even more. Finally, social uncertainty is attenuated further through learning processes that update these predictions based on new information. Our framework integrates research across fields to offer an account of the mechanisms motivating social cognition and action, laying the groundwork for future experiments that can illuminate the impact of uncertainty on social cognition.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.