Uncertainty in the physical, social, and virtual worlds

A useful starting-point for an overview of human responses to uncertainty is that people seem to draw upon two primary sources of heuristics for dealing with uncertainty and commonsense theories about it. The first one is commonsense realism, and the second is commonsense sociality. Commonsense realism encompasses lay theories and intuitions about the physical world and how it works. Commonsense sociality, on the other hand, refers to lay psychology and sociology-our theories and intuitions about how the psycho-social world works. From these two sources spring most, if not all, of our heuristics, devices, formal methods, abstract theories, and frameworks for coping with an uncertain world. They overlap and may provide conflicting prescriptions. Perhaps the strongest and most obvious link between them is vicarious learning or second-hand knowledge