The calculus of ignorance

Abstract

At least a minority of people consider it morally offensive for someone to tell them about the negative environmental impact of their own diet, especially when that diet has a greater negative impact (Bose et al., 2020). Less than a quarter of people at risk of Huntington’s disease elect to determine if they are a carrier of the lethal gene even though most who find out the answer, whether positive or negative, are happier than those who remain uncertain (Wiggins et al., 1992). On these and many other topics, people often choose not to know. What motivates this willful ignorance, what are its implications, and what should we do about it, if anything? Why we choose not to know is the topic of a new book by Ralph Hertwig and Christoph Engel, entitled Deliberate Ignorance: Choosing Not to Know. The question: If knowledge is so important to so many things – democracy, the environment, making choices in one’s own best interest – then what is the psychological basis for deliberate ignorance? The book itself is a model of scientific crowdsourcing, collecting more than 40 of the world’s experts on topics such as cognitive science, law, biology, history, bioethics, and economics, with the goal of laying out a foundation for starting to understand why it is that we often don’t want to know. In a leading chapter, Dagmar Ellerbrock and Ralph Hertwig set the stage with the case of the Stasi files. During the era of the German Democratic Republic, East Germany’s Secret Police – the Stasi –relied on civilian informers to provide information about who was disloyal to the party. Those living in East Germany could expect family members, friends, colleagues, even their spouses to potentially be an informer, providing information about them to the Stasi. This information along with who the informers were was collected in the Stasi files. After East Germany ceased to exist as a political entity, the Stasi files were eventually made public. A curious individual could go and look up their own file and discover who among their networkof friends and family was an informant, what information was provided, and what impact it had. But would you want to know? Should you even be allowed to know? Opinions are deeply divided, and as Ellerbrock and Hertwig’s chapter reveals in somewhat spine-tingling detail – imagine if you had been an informer – the history of the Stasi files is marked by controversy and incredible twists and turns.