Research Hit: Choosing Ignorance

Why some people choose ignorance over knowledge

What do you mean choose ignorance?

Choosing ignorance is when we chose to not know something because it might affect our choice, our personal gain, or feelings of guilt. For example, you might buy a cheap product and say, or think, that you don’t want to know under what conditions it was produced.

Don’t we all do that!?

Probably to a degree. But it is a little bit of a conundrum: we often preach moral standards, but fail to live up to them ourselves. In other context it is what is known as a value-action gap: for example, we say we want to protect the environment but fail to engage in activities that do protect the environment.

Right, but do we really choose ignorance?

Well, this is precisely what Linh Vu and colleagues researched and reviewed. The question they were trying to answer is how common is wilful ignorance and how much do people engage in this.

So, for example, in one study reviewed participants could choose between getting a reward and a charity also getting the same reward or getting a slightly larger reward but the charity receives less and following this whether they wanted to know what the consequence of their actions were.

So how many people choose the wilful ignorance?

How many do you think?