Doubt: Definition, Examples, & Quotes​

By Charlie Huntington, M.A., Ph.D. Candidate
​Reviewed by Tchiki Davis, M.A., Ph.D.
Doubt is the experience of not fully trusting one’s experience or understanding of a situation. We don’t enjoy being in doubt, and yet it happens all the time – could it possibly be good for us?​
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In the city where I live, there are more rocks than any person could possibly climb in their lifetime. Some of them jut from the earth like massive, wide, roughly hewn tabletops, angled perfectly to invite the adventurous to put on some grippy shoes and try scaling them. On one such climb, there is a well-known jump – a gap between what you’ve been climbing and the rest of the rock. It is an easy, downward jump, the kind of thing you 
would not hesitate to do if the rock below you did not seem to be simply disappearing out from under your feet.

Even though I was told ahead of time about this jump, I still swelled with uncertainty when I came to it for the first time. I did not trust what I was seeing; the gap seemed too large. Only after taking the leap and easily making it to the next foothold could I look back and see how safe I had been.
​
This situation, to me, seems to epitomize the experience of doubt. We look at the circumstances and struggle to find certainty about what is happening or what could happen. The information we have, and the perspective we possess, suggest things are unclear. We all know this kind of doubt is unpleasant, but could it ever be helpful? Why must we go through our lives doubting so much?
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What Is Doubt? (A Definition)​

We can define doubt as a lack of certainty and confidence in what we are experiencing or feeling (Lazarov et al., 2012). When we feel doubt, we are likely to experience most or all of the following (Baek, 2010):
 
Mixture of positive and negative feelings. If you feel uniformly positive or negative about a situation, you are unlikely to be experiencing doubt. Instead, doubt comes up when we have both unpleasant and pleasant feelings at the same time about a topic. For example, you might be very excited by the prospect of moving to a new city but also afraid of what it would mean to start over socially.
 
Conflicting attitudes. Thoughts or beliefs that conflict with each other are at the heart of doubt. Hand me the food menu at any restaurant, and I’ll instantly face these conflicting attitudes: I know the salad would be nutritious and tasty, but will I regret not getting a dish with some meat in it? I know my mouth is watering when I look at the burger menu, but might I feel unpleasantly full afterward?
 
Conflicting ideological constraints. This one sounds complicated, but I promise it’s not. What this means is that sometimes our values pull us in opposite directions, and that’s another reason that doubt can enter the picture. If you planned to call your parents tonight but a friend invites you to do something you think would be much more fun instead, what should you do? Your valuing of your family relationships and your valuing of friendship and quality leisure time are suddenly in conflict.
 
Conflicting reference groups. Similarly, suppose a loving parent is at work and gets a call from their adolescent son, who forgot to bring an important homework assignment to school and wants the parent to come to the rescue. The parent might be torn between their role as an employee (one reference group) and their role as a parent (another reference group).
 
To summarize, situations where doubt arises are likely to involve conflicting emotions, thoughts, values, and/or roles (Baek, 2010). In doubting situations, we are not indifferent to what’s happening, nor are we necessarily uncertain about what’s happening. Rather, because of the internal conflict we are experiencing, we have a hard time trusting ourselves to make the right decision.​

Opposite of Doubt​

The opposite of doubt is trusting one’s understanding or perception of the situation. In this sense, we might call the opposite of doubt certainty, or better yet, conviction. Note that this does not mean that the person feeling conviction has all the right facts and has come to the appropriate conclusion – they simply believe that they have. This is part of why having a healthy amount of doubt is often praised by scholars, philosophers in particular. We often make mistakes by trusting our perception of a given situation too much.

Why Is Doubt Important?

As one psychologist writes, learning to doubt things is an important developmental task – something children must learn to do in order to survive and thrive (Mills, 2013). Perhaps you remember how quickly you believed everything you were told as a young child and how you gradually came to recognize that people might deliberately mislead you. While we may begin our lives needing to be as open to learning from others and the world as possible, as we mature it becomes more important to know when to doubt something (Mills, 2013). 

​​Healthy Doubt

Adults who are overly trusting are often taken advantage of by others; they have not become sufficiently aware of the signals that somebody may be deceiving them or that the information available may be incomplete or distorted. I think this is also part of why critical thinking skills are often the focus of curricula in high schools and colleges: knowing what to believe and not believe and how to weigh evidence by thinking about the source, among other reflective skills, are key components of effective and mature decision-making.
 
At the same time, it’s important to study doubt because it is clear that while a healthy dose of doubt can be beneficial, too much doubt can be painful and disempowering (Braslow et al., 2012). For example, all of us, when faced with too much self-doubt, develop strategies for coping with those strong and persistent thoughts.
 
These responses can be adaptive or maladaptive, depending on far how we take them. Some of us self-handicap in the face of self-doubt: we take ourselves out of the running through self-sabotage, eliminating the anxiety of being in doubt by confirming that doubt. At other times, we may turn to overachievement, pushing through doubts to continually prove to ourselves that our doubts were unfounded. Or, we may succumb to imposter syndrome instead. Imposter syndrome is a phenomenon familiar to people in high-pressure professional settings: over time, we come to believe our doubts and see ourselves as incompetent or unworthy of the responsibility we have been given.
 
While there are some ways that self-handicapping, imposter syndrome, and overachievement can be adaptive responses to our doubts, they are usually unhelpful responses, in the sense that we continue to feel pressure and uncertainty. This makes the skill of resolving one’s doubts a crucial ability to develop.

Examples of Doubt

For some examples of doubts, we can turn to a favorite topic of mine: romantic relationships. Many, if not most, couples face doubts about themselves, their partner, or their relationship itself (Knobloch & Solomon, 1999), and sometimes these doubts are strong enough to motivate them to seek couple’s therapy. For example, doubts about long-term compatibility in a marriage can focus on everything from how much one partner values cleanliness to whether having just one sexual partner for the rest of one’s life feels feasible. Many couples are locked in a pattern where one partner pursues connection while the other partner withdraws or pushes them away. The first person likely doubts that the relationship will be okay unless there is more contact; at the same time, the other partner doubts that getting closer is a good idea.

What Does "Benefit of The Doubt" Mean?

To give something the benefit of the doubt is to move forward with it despite one’s doubts. If your friend canceled on your last two hangouts, you might have to give them the benefit of the doubt when they ask to see you again and say, “I promise I won’t cancel this time.” This phrasing is a little strange since what it really means is that you are choosing to look past your doubts.

What Does "Casting Doubt" Mean?​

To cast doubt on something is to give voice to concerns that could cause people to doubt it. To link this to our previous example, I might be ready to give my flaky friend the benefit of the doubt, until another friend casts further doubt on his reliability by saying, “You know, he ditched our plans just a couple days ago, too.”

Why Might You Doubt Yourself?

Here’s my take on this question: We doubt ourselves because life continually presents us with situations whose outcomes we cannot fully control. We are constantly motivated to seek certainty in our lives – to determine as much of our reality as we can – because this reduces anxiety, and so we experience an ability to resolve doubts as threatening and unpleasant (Braslow et al., 2012). In all these situations, we ask ourselves, “Am I able to get the results I want here?” and the amount of self-doubt we feel depends on the answer.

That said, some people experience more self-doubt than others. People who self-doubt more tend to have lower self-esteem (Oleson et al., 2000), for example. I imagine that this is a problem that compounds over time: people who do not experience the world as something they can influence will grow more doubtful of their abilities over time.

When Is Doubt Good?

All that said, doubt is far from an inherently bad thing. For example, when a salesperson appears on my doorstep or calls my phone, I think it is pretty helpful for me to be skeptical and to hold on to that doubt (Jonas et al., 2000).
 
In fact, since doubt happens so frequently, and things that aren’t adaptive tend to happen less and less, doubt must be quite useful in some way. One way we can conceptualize this usefulness is in terms of flexibility and inflexibility and in terms of engagement and disengagement (Rothman et al., 2017). Being doubtful may cause me to disengage when it is helpful to disengage or engage when staying involved is beneficial. If I am very doubtful that I can complete a climbing route, it is probably better to back off. At the same time, if my doubts make me curious about a topic, and I end up learning more about it, that may be to my benefit.
 
Flexibility and inflexibility can work in a similar way. Let’s go back to the climbing wall. If I am doubtful that you will pull off a climb, I may insist that you wear your helmet, making you safer. At the same time, your doubt in your own abilities may cause you to be more flexible in how you approach the climb; you might lower your expectations of yourself so that you do not take unnecessary risks.

If you are not convinced yet of the helpfulness of doubt, I recommend watching this video:​

Video: Virtue of Doubt

Tips on Making The Most of Doubt

To make the most of doubt, we can try to focus on checking the facts related to our doubt (Tuckett, 2011). This can look like acknowledging the attractive and unattractive qualities of the situation but being as honest with ourselves as possible about how certain each of those qualities is. For example, when we critically examine the upsides and downsides of a situation, we may find that fear or excitement is causing us to overestimate the pros or cons.
 
We can also take the perspective that doubt is here to help us adjust to the situation (Fong, 2006) – we can accept that it is asking us to adjust our flexibility or level of engagement (Rothman et al., 2017). And when our doubts are hard to resolve, we can just do our best to tolerate ambiguity, recognizing it as an inevitable part of life (Greco & Roger, 2001).

Doubt in OCD

Psychologists recognize doubt as a common and debilitating part of having obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). Concerningly, the more people check on things – to try to remove their doubts – the more doubtful they may become (Radomsky et al., 2014). And high levels of doubt are not found only in people with OCD; people who experience a lot of doubt are more likely to be diagnosed with depression and anxiety and to experience high levels of negative emotions (Samuels et al., 2017).

Quotes on Doubt

  • “Doubt is an uncomfortable condition, but certainty is a ridiculous one.” ― Voltaire
  • “When you doubt your power, you give power to your doubt.” ― Honore de Balzac
  • “The fundamental cause of the trouble is that in the modern world the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt.” ― Bertrand Russell
  • To doubt everything, or, to believe everything, are two equally convenient solutions; both dispense with the necessity of reflection. ― Henri Poincare

Articles Related to Doubt

​Want to learn more? Check out these articles:

Books Related to Doubt

If you’d like to keep learning more, here are a few books that you might be interested in.

Final Thoughts on Doubt​

Our doubts can be our teachers – they can show us where we need to adjust our approach or expectations, where we might want to work harder to improve our sense of competency, or where we really need to surrender control because we’re just not in charge. I hope reading this article makes it a bit easier to experience the upsides of doubt.

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