People with a spirit of giving strive to understand how their actions will affect others, while willful ignorance can free individuals to act selfishly.
Introduction
Willful ignorance, which is the avoidance of information related to the potential harms of one’s actions, is very common. Despite the abundant scientific evidence on climate change, for example, many people still avoid confronting the facts of global warming. They often do not wish to know about the harsh living conditions of farm animals. Consumers frequently ignore the sources of the products they purchase.
Willful Ignorance and Generosity
As behavioral scientists, we wanted to understand how widespread willful ignorance is and the reasons that drive people to engage in it. We collected data from multiple research projects that included over 6,000 individuals. We discovered that willful ignorance is common and detrimental, as 40 percent of people choose not to know the consequences of their actions to relieve themselves of guilt while maximizing personal gain. However, we also found that around 40 percent of people are generous: they seek out information rather than avoiding it about the consequences of their actions to enhance benefits for others.
Data Analysis
In our analysis, we examined data from 22 previous studies on willful ignorance. This approach provided us with a broader and more comprehensive view of this phenomenon than prior research. Despite the different specific experiments, most involved pairing participants. People participated in the study either online or in-person in a lab setting. Regardless of the setup, participants did not interact and remained anonymous to each other. Meanwhile, the researchers knew how many people made a particular decision but could not identify who chose what.
Experiments and Results
In the experiments, researchers asked one member of each pair to choose between two options. This choice would determine the profits for themselves and their partner. These decisions were made in either of the two setups. In the transparent setup, decision-makers had information on how their choice would impact themselves and their partner. In the ambiguous setup, the decision-maker knew how significant their choice would be for themselves but not for their partner – although they could request this insight.
For example, participants in several studies had to decide between receiving $5 or $6. In the transparent setup, if they chose $5 for themselves, they knew that their partner would also receive $5. If they chose $6 for themselves, they understood that their partner would only receive $1 in return.
In the ambiguous setup, profits for the partners functioned differently. In this case, there were two possible scenarios. In the first scenario, if the decision-maker chose $6 for themselves, their partner would receive $1, and if the decision-maker chose $5, their partner would receive $5 (just like in the transparent case). However, in a second scenario, the decision-maker could choose $6, and their partner would receive $5, or the decision-maker could choose $5, and their partner would receive $1.
The decision-maker was aware of these two systems and understood how to achieve higher profits for themselves – but they were not initially aware of which scenario was in play. Interestingly, the decision-maker had the opportunity to resolve this ambiguity: by clicking a button, they could find out which payment system would apply to their decision. This option for obtaining more information provided scientists with a means to evaluate willful ignorance.
Results and Conclusions
We found across all studies that when participants were informed about the consequences of their choices – the transparent setup – the majority (55 percent) chose the generous option. This meant they forfeited part of their profits to share equally with their partner. The remaining 45 percent retained greater profits at the expense of their partner.
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The ambiguous setting, 40 percent of participants chose to remain ignorant. And ignorance liberated them to be selfish: 60 percent of the individuals in the ignorant group chose higher personal gains in scenarios that came at the expense of their partner. Among those who requested more information, 36 percent opted to retain higher profits at the expense of their partner.
This means that the overall balance leans towards selfishness when participants have the option to avoid information. Only 39 percent of people in the ambiguous setting made the choice that benefited their partner – a significant drop from 55 percent in the transparent condition.
But how do we know if ignorance in the ambiguous setting is deliberate ignorance? Could it be that some people are avoiding information unintentionally? To understand this point, we conducted a second analysis focusing on what motivates people to seek information.
In this analysis, we looked at how people who chose to seek additional information behaved compared to those who were provided with information. We found that individuals who opted to receive information in the ambiguous setting were at least seven percentage points more likely to make the generous choice compared to those in the transparent setting. In other words, our analyses identify some genuine representatives of giving: people who seek information and then make a decision that benefits their partner, even at their own expense. This indicates that the search for information is partially motivated by the desire to do the right thing. Similarly, the finding also suggests that choosing ignorance has value for people who want an excuse to be selfish.
We cannot rule out that some individuals may have failed to click the button for more information unintentionally. But if confusion, laziness, or even apathy were the only factors driving ignorance, we would not observe any real differences in our comparison. We found that seeking information was associated with a clear motivation: these genuinely generous individuals wanted to benefit their partner. Thus, ignorance is partially motivated by the desire to protect oneself from self-judgment.
Combating Deliberate Ignorance
Our results suggest that some generous behaviors in life are performed because people feel pressured to do what is expected of them. When the consequences of choices are made clear, people may feel obligated to make small sacrifices and be generous to others. But when given the opportunity, people may wish to ignore the consequences of their actions. Ignorance protects people from knowing how their actions hurt others and makes them feel less bad about themselves.
Thus, our findings hint at ways to combat deliberate ignorance. In the studies we analyzed, decisions were made within an ethical framework: you could benefit yourself at the expense of your partner. This framing is a fertile ground for deliberate ignorance because it poses a threat to a person’s self-image, increasing the feeling that if you truly knew what was happening, you would have to make harder choices to be a good person.
If we can avoid putting a strong ethical focus on decisions, it might make people feel less threatened and thus less deliberately ignorant. Other research groups have found promising ways to do this. For example, we could present options in ways that highlight ethical choices first, such as making plant-based options the default choice, allowing people to choose meat as part of efforts to encourage sustainable food choices. Or we could encourage people to think more positively about good deeds instead of weighing down their consciences for what they have not done. Highlighting recent global achievements, such as healing the ozone layer, could encourage people to continue doing good rather than feeling that the battle is over and everything is dark and gloomy. We may not have Dickensian ghosts to guide us – but there are still steps we can take to encourage giving and generosity in ourselves and others.
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This is an opinion and analysis piece, and the views expressed by the author or authors are not necessarily those of Scientific American.
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Lin Fu is a PhD student at the University of Amsterdam, where he studies how and why people make moral decisions. More from Lin Fu Margarita Lib is an Assistant Professor at Tilburg University in the Netherlands, where she studies moral decision-making. More from Margarita Lib
Source: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-some-people-choose-not-to-know/
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