Could a drive for certainty be key to autism?
Reframing special interests, systemizing, and social difficulty through a new lens: intolerance of uncertainty
Carl Linnaeus, Leonardo da Vinci, and Emily Dickinson are three eminently different historical figures, but they share a key trait: they were relentless systemizers.
Linnaeus, the father of taxonomy, famously created the classification system we still use today. Leonardo’s lifelong pursuit was to find a universal pattern that linked nature at every scale: from the proportions of the human body, to the heavenly bodies in the cosmos. Dickinson’s unique poetic grammar is well known; less understood is her use of rigid communication systems to maintain a highly active social life.
I’ve been examining their lives as part of my historical figures project. Toggling between their stories and modern autism research, I came across a concept I hadn’t encountered before: intolerance of uncertainty (IU).
As I sifted through the research, I started to suspect that the concept of uncertainty—and its opposite, certainty—may be a hidden key to autism.
And a way of seeing the systemizing tendencies of Linnaeus, Leonardo, and Dickinson in a fresh light.
First, a brief history of the concept.
Intolerance of uncertainty first gained traction in the 1990s, primarily in research on generalized anxiety disorder. Psychologists Michel Dugas and Robert Ladouceur were instrumental in defining IU as a dispositional characteristic (i.e., a trait) resulting from a set of negative beliefs about uncertainty and its implications. They argued that people high in IU perceive uncertain situations as stressful and threatening, which leads to worry and avoidance behaviors.
As the concept proved robust in generalized anxiety disorder research, in the 2000s-2010s IU began to be investigated across a range of disorders, including OCD, social anxiety disorder, and depression.
In the 2010s, researchers began to study IU in autism. They found that autistic people often show:
Elevated baseline IU scores (link to study)
Correlations between IU and sensory sensitivity, after controlling for anxiety (link to study)
A key finding was that IU may mediate the relationship between autism and anxiety, meaning that the distress many autistic people experience in unpredictable environments might explain their high rates of anxiety.
An episode from my past shows just how profoundly intolerance of uncertainty has shaped my behavior.
It was Thanksgiving, and I was visiting my then-partner’s family. We weren’t staying with them—we had a hotel room in a nearby city—and the day stretched into night. His siblings and their families trickled out. Still, we remained, sitting with his parents in what I experienced as awkward, trying small talk. I wanted to ask when we’d be leaving, but doing that in front of his parents would have been rude.
As the minutes passed, my unease mounted. It wasn’t just social fatigue; it was the not knowing. If I knew that I had to withstand 30 minutes, an hour, two hours more, I could mentally prepare. But not knowing how much longer I would be there, expending energy playing my social role, was agonizing. Even painful.
When his parents stepped out of the room and we had a brief private moment, I erupted. Why hadn’t he checked in with me about our plans? Why didn’t he tell me when we’d be leaving? I thought the lack of a definitive plan was inconsiderate. From his perspective, I was displaying my trademark inflexibility. Why couldn’t I just go with the flow?
In truth, we were caught between competing values. I prize clarity. I assume others do too, so I communicate timelines and expectations as a form of care. He prized flexibility, and assumed others could ride the moment just as easily as he could. Neither of us was trying to be inconsiderate, and we were frustrated by our inability to understand the other’s behavior.
Back then, I didn’t see any of this. I just knew I felt trapped at his parents’ house. My autism diagnosis and linked insights have given me the perspective I once lacked.
This episode mirrors what researchers have increasingly found: intolerance of uncertainty plays a major role in autistic anxiety.
But I suspect IU reaches even deeper than that. I see potential links to a number of traits, including ones central to my own experience: compulsive curiosity and the drive to uncover patterns.
Autistic special interests are well-documented, often described as intense, absorbing, and detail-focused. In a previous post, I wrote about mine, and particularly how they burn hot and then fizzle out. As I returned to that post while writing this one, the comments took on new resonance:
One reader wrote, “the challenge of the learning curve is what keeps me hooked, but once the curve flattens and it’s all about maintenance, the interest fades.”
Another described the beginning of a special interest as “a rocket ship taking off,” but said once it “levels off […] the really good stuff is over.”
A third noted, “if I ‘know’ how to do the whole thing perfectly, it’s as good as done, and I don’t need to struggle through the uncomfortable mess of actually doing it!”
Each was circling the same explanation: curiosity fueled by an intense phase of understanding, and disinterest once a certain level of knowledge was reached.
That’s when it hit me: Could IU be at play here too?
But “intolerance” of uncertainty feels like the wrong frame. What if what animates these special interests isn’t the discomfort of uncertainty, but the satisfaction of resolving it? A positive pull rather than an aversion.
Maybe what draws us to a special interest is the potential to dispel uncertainty. There’s a mystery to solve, a wilderness to tame.
Leonardo’s vanishing drive
Leonardo da Vinci first caught my attention because of his tendency to abandon works. It reminded me of my own cycle of intense but fleeting fascinations.
The pattern was clear: a burst of deep engagement, followed by disinterest. For instance, Adoration of the Magi—one of his most iconic works—was a study for a more complete painting that never materialized.
Often, what he turned to instead were intellectual pursuits driven by his own curiosity, not a patron’s commission. Leonardo’s voluminous notebooks, which we still have today, brim with ideas on patterns of waves and water, engineering and construction methods, reflections on shadows and human anatomy.
Let’s apply our reader-derived special interest theory to Leonardo: perhaps once he had mentally solved the core problems of a painting, its pull vanished. He’d resolved the uncertainty. The mystery was gone, and so too was his interest. In grabbing the Adoration image for this post, I was intrigued to see the Uffizi’s description of its unfinished state:
Leonardo took the development of the work to different stages: some of the characters are barely sketched out, while others, as if to grasp an idea, are more finished.
This was a recurring pattern for Leonardo; the historical record is dotted with complaining patrons trying to track him down. In a letter to a noblewoman inquiring about her long-overdue portrait, an acquaintance wrote: “He devotes much of his time to geometry, and has no fondness at all for the paintbrush.” After performing some initial work on her portrait, he had moved on—never to return.
To an outsider, it looked like flakiness. But if IU or its inverse—the desire to make the uncertain, certain—was a driver of his creative pursuits, then he may have left the work once he figured out how to solve its core problem. Knowing the solution was what mattered. Execution for its own sake, once the path was clearly mapped, was trivial.
There’s a direct correspondence between Leonardo’s pattern of rotating special interests and my own (not, of course, concerning their impact on the world…).
This certainty/uncertainty model offers interpretive lenses for other historical figures, too.
Carl Linnaeus: order above all
Carl Linnaeus, for all his avowed empiricism, sometimes sacrificed truth in service of a larger goal: preserving the coherence of his classification system. When empirical facts clashed with his framework, he was known to ignore them.
“Without the system,” he wrote, “chaos would reign.” For him, imposing order took precedence over sticking strictly to facts. What mattered in this framework was not that his system was empirically sacrosanct but that it imposed a close-ended order, without gaps.
He also treated dissent from his system as a kind of betrayal. Students who spread his method over Europe were his “disciples.” Those who questioned it were treated as traitors.
Is there an autistic resonance in Linnaeus’s thin-skinned reactivity? Perhaps. It’s tempting to invoke links to vulnerable narcissism or Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria.
But there may be something more elemental: a defense of the system not only because it’s “mine,” but because it’s the moat between order and chaos. Question the framework, and you reintroduce uncertainty. Depending on your tolerance for uncertainty, that can feel painful. A state to be avoided, even at the cost of social relations.
Emily Dickinson: controlled communication
Emily Dickinson’s poems weren’t just artistic expression; they were part of a tightly choreographed communication system. They were often sent with letters to her intimates, forming part of her overall message.
While she’s remembered as a recluse, she was in fact intensely social—just not in person. She built deep relationships entirely through letters, short notes, and poems, even with people who lived nearby.
Dickinson maintained regular and frequent social contact. For instance, she wrote to her brother’s family next door every day, sometimes several times a day.
If she desired social connection, why did she avoid face-to-face encounters? In one letter, she explained her preference this way: “A Pen has so many inflections and a Voice but one.”
Live conversation was uncontrollable and unpredictable. Limited as she was to a single “Voice,” she couldn’t play with different registers of delivery, and her communications could be painfully misconstrued. She would also have to extemporate, robbing her of the chance to be deliberate with her words. In-person communication was a blunt instrument. Writing allowed calibration, nuance, and control. Through it, she was able to impose rules on the chaos of social interaction.
I suspect that’s why many autistic people sometimes prefer asynchronous or text-based interaction, as well as one-on-one socializing over groups. I certainly do. In one-on-one settings, I can have more influence in how things go. Control allows prediction. Prediction reduces uncertainty.
The more I reflect, the more this framework holds explanatory power for autism. For instance:
We engage in ritual and routine not just to soothe, but to reduce unpredictability to a manageable level.
We pursue interests not just out of passion, but for the satisfaction of rendering the uncertain, certain.
We become stressed by sensory overload in part because we struggle to habituate (as I covered in a previous post), which means things become familiar to us less quickly.
We teach ourselves things because only firsthand experience, rather than truths handed down by others, fully resolves our doubts.
We find socializing difficult not just because we mask to fit in, but because it’s unpredictable, chaotic even.
What if a desire to create certainty, and an avoidance of the uncertain when we’re helpless to resolve it, is the hidden logic beneath many autistic traits?
For a pattern seeker like myself, this hypothesis has the allure of something big, something fundamental. The idea that intolerance of uncertainty could link so many disparate traits into a coherent whole scratches an itch, in an immensely satisfying way.
Still, given the seductive power of elegant theories, a dose of caution is warranted. IU excites me because it promises to impose order on what can feel like a chaotic grab-bag of autistic traits. But perhaps that’s reason enough to be skeptical. Linnaeus, after all, reminds us how the drive to classify can sometimes sacrifice accuracy. (Though to his credit, his system did leave a lasting mark.)
Even so, my gut tells me there’s something here. I’m working now on developing this idea into a conceptual framework paper. My first attempt at writing for peer-reviewed publication! I’ll share a link once the preprint is live.
And because I can’t let go of the historical figures I’ve touched on here, I’m also exploring their stories more deeply for a nonfiction book on autism, pattern-seeking, and the minds history has misunderstood.
I’d love to hear—what role has uncertainty played in your life, in your patterns of behavior?
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Research cited in this post:
Michel J. Dugas, Fabien Gagnon, Robert Ladouceur, Mark H. Freeston, Generalized anxiety disorder: a preliminary test of a conceptual model, Behaviour Research and Therapy, Volume 36, Issue 2, 1998, Pages 215-226, ISSN 0005-7967. Abstract link
Keefer A, Singh V, Jang YS, Alon L, Surmacz M, Holingue C, Mostofsky SH, Vasa RA. Exploring the Symptom Profiles of Intolerance of Uncertainty in Autistic Children. J Autism Dev Disord. 2024 Jan;54(1):121-130. doi: 10.1007/s10803-022-05744-3. Epub 2022 Oct 13. PMID: 36227445; PMCID: PMC10097837. Full text link
Neil L, Olsson NC, Pellicano E. The Relationship Between Intolerance of Uncertainty, Sensory Sensitivities, and Anxiety in Autistic and Typically Developing Children. J Autism Dev Disord. 2016 Jun;46(6):1962-1973. doi: 10.1007/s10803-016-2721-9. PMID: 26864157; PMCID: PMC4860201. Abstract link
Jenkinson R, Milne E, Thompson A. The relationship between intolerance of uncertainty and anxiety in autism: A systematic literature review and meta-analysis. Autism. 2020 Nov;24(8):1933-1944. doi: 10.1177/1362361320932437. Epub 2020 Jun 22. PMID: 32564625; PMCID: PMC7539603. Full text link
Stay curious,
Laura
This me, spiraling right now from uncertainty, lack of control over my time visiting relatives for 2 weeks. Oh my God you see me.
What fascinates me about IU is how it shows up.
There is friction between intuitive clarity and socially enforced ambiguity. Many of us learn early on to override intuition. We’re taught to mask, conform and adopt rules that don’t make sense. I wonder if some of the anxiety we feel later in uncertain situations is the result of being trained to question our own intuitive signals.
Recently, I spent weeks trying to figure out the psychology of an acquaintance. I always got an “off” feeling about him, but because he’s connected to a friend, I did the socially acceptable thing: override intuition and give him a chance. That was far easier than saying, “Bro, you creep me out. What’s up with you?”
After he sent an email that didn’t sit right, I started digging to ease the uncertainty. On the outside, it looked obsessive. I was embarrassed about the amount of articles I was looking up and switched tabs in shame when my husband walked by. But inside, it felt like creating safety.
I’d never encountered someone who manipulated people the way he does, and I became curious about the mechanics how someone ends up like that. Once I had a name for it, a reason for it, and patterns to look out for, (as usual) I let it go… but not so much that I don’t still talk about this “discovery.”
That is the downside of IU for me. The upside is that I get to create and write what interests me without regard or care what anyone else is doing or how they’re doing it. Creating, for me, is intuitive. And for whatever reason, people tend to accept antidotes for IU when you’re a creative. They stop holding you accountable to social contracts you never agreed to sign. Your writing, again, exemplifies the beauty of IU.