Anxiety/Uncertainty Management Theory
Inspired by Berger's Theory, the late California State, Fullerton, communication professor William Gudykunst began to apply some of the axioms and theorems of Uncertainty Reduction Theory to intercultural settings. Despite their common axiomatic format and parallel focus on the meeting of strangers, Gudykunst's Anxiety/Uncertainty Management Theory (AUM) differs from Berger's Uncertainty Reduction Theory in several significant ways. First, AUM asserts that people do not always try to reduce uncertainty. When uncertainty allows people to maintain positive predicted outcome values, they may choose to manage their information intake such that they balance their level of uncertainty. Second, AUM claims that people experience uncertainty differently in different situations. People must evaluate whether a particular instance of uncertainty is stressful, and if so, what resources are available.
Read more about this topic: Uncertainty Reduction Theory
Famous quotes containing the words anxiety, uncertainty, management and/or theory:
“The infant’s first social achievement, then, is his willingness to let the mother out of sight without undue anxiety or rage, because she has become an inner certainty as well as an outer predictability.”
—Erik H. Erikson (1904–1994)
“Now, since our condition accommodates things to itself, and transforms them according to itself, we no longer know things in their reality; for nothing comes to us that is not altered and falsified by our Senses. When the compass, the square, and the rule are untrue, all the calculations drawn from them, all the buildings erected by their measure, are of necessity also defective and out of plumb. The uncertainty of our senses renders uncertain everything that they produce.”
—Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592)
“People have described me as a “management bishop” but I say to my critics, “Jesus was a management expert too.””
—George Carey (b. 1935)
“A theory of the middle class: that it is not to be determined by its financial situation but rather by its relation to government. That is, one could shade down from an actual ruling or governing class to a class hopelessly out of relation to government, thinking of gov’t as beyond its control, of itself as wholly controlled by gov’t. Somewhere in between and in gradations is the group that has the sense that gov’t exists for it, and shapes its consciousness accordingly.”
—Lionel Trilling (1905–1975)