Sure, Knowledge Is Power, but Ignorance Is Underrated

We crave knowledge. Only ostriches stick their heads in the sand. Right? Well, then, how can we explain the following?

“Don’t tell me how the movie ends.”

“Don’t tell me if I have the gene for that disease.”

“Don’t tell me my startup is likely to fail.”

“Don’t tell me if my spouse cheated on me.”

“Don’t tell me how they slaughter veal calves.”

In many cases, let’s face it, we prefer not to know things, contrary to simple economic theories that say more information is always better. We tell one another that ignorance is bliss. We reject too much information.

We even structure our societies to exclude knowledge for certain purposes. Courts have inadmissible evidence. Employers have inadmissible questions for applicants. For 17 years, the military’s policy on homosexuality was “Don’t ask, don’t tell.” More recently, many colleges stopped asking for SAT and ACT scores, although some have started asking for them again.

This week I read a book on the topic, “Deliberate Ignorance: Choosing Not to Know.” Published in paperback in 2021, it’s a compilation of scholarly articles edited by Ralph Hertwig and Christoph Engel. Engel is a specialist in law and economics at the Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods in Bonn, Germany, and Hertwig, a psychologist, is an expert on adaptive rationality at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin.

Deliberate ignorance “is an underrated mental tool,” the editors write in their introduction. They write, with intended irony, that psychological science “has erred in choosing to remain largely ignorant on the topic of deliberate ignorance.”