Psychological Flexibility and Decision Quality Under Conditions of Digital Uncertainty

Marit van Dijk

Psychological Flexibility and Decision Quality Under Conditions of Digital Uncertainty

Author(s)	Dr. Marit van Dijk
Country	United States
Abstract	Contemporary decision-making increasingly occurs within digital environments characterized by rapidly changing information, conflicting recommendations, algorithmically ranked content, incomplete evidence, multiple communication channels, and persistent informational uncertainty. Although access to digital information can improve decision quality, excessive or contradictory input may increase cognitive load, encourage premature closure, intensify uncertainty, and interfere with effective evidence evaluation. Psychological flexibility may represent an important individual capability for maintaining adaptive behavior under these conditions because it involves remaining open to difficult internal experiences, maintaining present-focused awareness, revising responses when situational demands change, and acting consistently with relevant goals and values. A design-science and simulation-based methodology was adopted because no empirical participant dataset was supplied. The analytical model generated 2,700 synthetic decision episodes distributed across low, moderate, and high psychological-flexibility conditions and moderate versus high digital-uncertainty environments. Under high digital uncertainty, the simulated Decision Quality Index increased from 45.8 among low-flexibility profiles to 64.7 among moderate-flexibility profiles and 76.2 among high-flexibility profiles. Correct-decision rates increased from 47.8% to 77.1%, while premature closure decreased from 54.2% to 20.4%. Evidence-updating behavior simultaneously increased from 40.0% to 75.8%. The protective difference associated with psychological flexibility was smaller when digital uncertainty was moderate, indicating that flexibility may become especially important when information environments are unstable, contradictory, or cognitively demanding. These results represent theoretical simulation rather than observations from human participants. The findings nevertheless provide a structured basis for future empirical research examining psychological flexibility as a decision-regulation resource in digitally uncertain environments. The study concludes that high-quality digital decision-making requires not only information access and digital literacy but also the psychological capacity to tolerate ambiguity, reconsider prior judgments, distinguish uncertainty from threat, and continue goal-consistent reasoning despite informational complexity.
Keywords	psychological flexibility; digital uncertainty; decision quality; information overload; uncertainty tolerance; cognitive flexibility; digital decision-making; evidence updating; decision confidence; adaptive behavior
Field	Engineering
Published In	Volume 1, Issue 4, July-August 2020
Published On	2020-07-06

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American Journal of Advanced Multidisciplinary Innovation and Research

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Psychological Flexibility and Decision Quality Under Conditions of Digital Uncertainty

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