Certainty Effect

When confidence in a highly probable event becomes low

Have you ever waited for an exam result anxiously, even when you know you have done really well?

Say you got a usual fever. You visit a nearby doctor. The doctor asks you to take a blood test for a severe disease. All the while verbally stating that this is most likely a minor problem.

You take the test and you are told it shall take a day for the result to come out. How would you possibly feel until the test results come out?

In both these cases, anxiety stemming out of lowered confidence on a likely event becomes the key explanation of certainty effect.

Yet again, one of the fundamental attributes of this psychological effect is the vivid imagination of failing in the exam or the medical test turning out to be awful.

Perfectionists’ effect

A good thing about the certainty effect is that one can see its flavour in the behaviour of perfectionists.

You can obviously notice that they painstakingly take every step to ensure flawless execution.

Easily relatable examples would be Apple for Phones, Nike for Shoes, Aamir Khan in Bollywood.

Certainty effect could be one of the reasons that repeated success of lasting perfectionists doesn’t generally cause complacency.

Certainty vs. Possibility

I have talked about the possibility effect in my earlier article here.

An arguable comment would be that lower certainty of an event is the higher possibility of its opposite.

Then why do these two discrete effects exist? Aren’t they simply mirror images of the same psychological effect?

I will sign-off with those parting questions and try to answer them in my next article :)