Researchers Learn Why People Choose to be Willfully Ignorant

In short, it allows people to avoid feelings of guilt when they act selfishly

Hiya!

When the World Wide Web became more widely available to the public in the 1990s, one might have predicted that access to such a massive amount of information at the click of a button might overwhelm us. And if we weren’t overwhelmed, we’d use it to advance our intelligence even further.

Over thirty years later, we might say both predictions came true. After all, Millennials and Gen Z are statistically the most educated generations so far, though for more reasons than just internet access. However, the level of dis-and-misinformation online today is overwhelming, and it can be challenging and time-consuming to discern fact from fiction.

Still, despite our ability to access the truth, it seems as if we’re becoming more willfully ignorant than ever. So what’s the deal? Well, a couple of researchers wanted to find out.

The Curiosity

Willful ignorance no longer lurks in the shadows but is proudly displayed and defended. It’s easy to scowl at those you see choosing to ignore facts, but the truth is, willful ignorance is so widespread that it’s challenging to find anyone, including ourselves, who doesn’t utilize it in some way.

I mean, how many meat-eaters do you know who willfully avoid learning about the harsh living conditions of the animal farms their meat comes from? Or how about climate change? I doubt I even need to expand on that one.

The point is, willful ignorance is ubiquitous among humans. In an article by the American Psychological Association (APA) about the research I’ll tell you about next, lead author Linh Vu, MS, a doctoral candidate at the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands, said:

“Examples of such willful ignorance abound in everyday life, such as when consumers ignore information about the problematic origins of the products they buy. We wanted to know just how prevalent and how harmful willful ignorance is, as well as why people engage in it.”

To find out, Vu, who studies how and why people make ethical decisions, and Margarita Leib, an assistant professor at Tilburg University in the Netherlands, where she studies ethical decision-making, completed a meta-analysis involving 22 research studies and 6,531 participants.

The studies were conducted in research labs or online, and most followed a protocol in which some participants were informed of the consequences of their decisions while others could choose to learn the outcomes or not. They published their research in Psychological Bulletin in 2023.

The Experiments