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Another aspect of a persons certainty is that others may suffer from it as much or more than the person who is certain. Think of all the deaths, persecutions, misery and destruction around the globe that have resulted from the certainty of religious prophets and institutions, revolutionaries, and politicians—all of whom are totally convinced that they were right.
Each of us has a way to assess experience and provide us with a measure of how certain we are about it. This has often been called a persons “convincer strategy.” The exploration of the variety of ways that people use to convince themselves of something is also relevant to the topic of certainty, but this article will only discuss the result of the operation of the convincer strategy.
Every evaluation that someone makes at level 2 has some degree of certainty/uncertainty about it at level 3, and this will be on a continuum from zero certainty to absolute certainty. There are basically three possibilities:
A. Zero certainty
If a person has zero certainty, they have no firm conclusion whatsoever about the meaning of X, so they are completely open to considering new understandings when they are offered, and they will be very easy to work with in exploring other ways of thinking about the situation X. This is an “easy client,” because their understanding of a situation is very fluid, and they have no, or very little, certainty about their understanding to lock in the understanding, and make it hard to change.
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