Rigidity, Discontinuity, and Chaos*

I was up unusually early this morning (by my standards), and energetic, and with great enthusiasm I drove to the office to copy bits from a dozen library books so I could get rid of them... but I'd left my security card at home and couldn't get into the building, and didn't have time to go back for it. Oh well. I guess it's good in that instead I focused on reading papers I already have, rather than just adding to the stacks.

One thing I read today had something particularly useful! This was a seminal paper from 1949 on one aspect of cognitive style, called "intolerance of ambiguity," which I'm using in my research. The useful bit was that this researcher found that among children, rigid thought patterns were associated with a belief in future cataclysmic change (whether for good or bad). That is, the rigid thinkers were likely to agree with statements like, "If everything would change, the world would be much better," or "Some day a flood or earthquake will destroy everybody in the whole world." Since catastrophic and utopian themes are prevalent among the militant extremist groups that my advisor and I have been studying, this tied together so nicely!

* That was a heading for one of the paper's sections. I love it.