October 20, 2023, reading time: 3 minutes.
Willful ignorance: We don’t want some information at all – be it a diagnosis of an illness or the climate consequences of our actions. Researchers have now elucidated the psychological mechanisms behind it. Accordingly, conscious ignorance is closely related to our egoism. Because if you don’t know the consequences of your own decisions, you can act selfishly and still maintain a positive self-image. Chosen ignorance thus offers an opportunity to evade moral demands.
Whether it’s the climate crisis, news of war or the environmentally harmful origins of our clothing: we don’t always want to have all the information we could get. Even if the additional knowledge could be helpful for us, it sometimes represents a burden that we would rather avoid – for example if we find out about our risk of serious illnesses. Even when it comes to the consequences of our actions, ignorance can be a more comfortable choice.
“Examples of such willful ignorance abound in everyday life, such as when consumers ignore information about the problematic origins of the products they buy,” says Linh Vu from the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands. “We wanted to know how widespread and damaging willful ignorance is and why people engage in it.”
A lot for me, little for the others?
There was already an influential study on this question in 2007: In it, test subjects were given the choice of receiving either five or six dollars. If they chose the smaller reward, another person also received five dollars. On the other hand, if they chose the larger reward, the other person only received one dollar. While one group of test subjects received this information without being asked, others were allowed to decide for themselves whether they wanted to find out how their decision affected the other person’s wages.
At that time it became clear that while around three quarters of those who were informed without being asked chose the altruistic option, 44 percent of the people who had the choice decided to remain uninformed and take advantage of the option that was most lucrative for them. Since then, this experiment has been repeated several times in different versions. This time the other person was not an anonymous person, but a charitable organization. Sometimes the participants had to pay a small amount to receive information about the consequences – similar to how obtaining information in real life sometimes involves effort or costs.
Better to avoid information
In order to find out more about the motives behind the chosen ignorance, Vu and her team have now compiled and evaluated the previous findings. For their meta-study, they used the results of 22 studies, most of them from Germany and the USA, in which a total of 6,531 participants were asked to make more than 33,000 informed or uninformed decisions.
The results confirm the tendency towards conscious ignorance: “On average of all studies evaluated, 39.8 percent of the test subjects decided to avoid information about the consequences of their actions,” reports the research team. Whether the information was associated with costs did not play a significant role – probably, according to the researchers, because the costs were very low in all cases.
Altruism for a clear conscience
The experiments also revealed the consequences of this willful ignorance: subjects who did not want to know the consequences of their decision behaved more selfishly. This was regardless of whether the recipient was a fellow player or a charity. On the other hand, those who consciously decided to get all the information tended to act the most altruistically. Their probability of choosing the altruistic option was seven percentage points higher than participants who were informed without being asked.
“While most people are willing to do the right thing when they are fully informed about the consequences of their actions, that willingness does not always come from standing up for others,” says Vu’s colleague Shaul Shalvi. “Part of the reason people act altruistically is due to societal pressure, but also a desire to see themselves in a good light.”
At the same time, this also explains why many people prefer willful ignorance: “Since righteousness is often costly and requires people to spend time, money and effort, ignorance offers an easy way out,” explains Shalvi. (Psychological Bulletin, 2023, doi: 10.1037/bul0000398)
Source: American Psychological Association
October 20, 2023 – Elena Bernard/ NPO