To avoid negative emotions

Corona pandemic, Ukraine war, climate crisis: The past three years have pushed even experienced readers to their emotional limits. Some people could no longer stop consuming bad news and engaged in so-called doom scrolling. A word composed of the English term for “downfall” (doom) and the German “scrolling”. It describes excessive reading of somber news.

But many others deliberately refrained from consuming news. Once a year, the «Reuters Institute Digital News Report»how people from 46 countries use news. The result in 2022 is: only about half of the Swiss want to know what is in newspapers and on online news portals. A third of those surveyed even stated that news had a negative effect on their mood and that they therefore refrained from consuming it.

It would have advantages to be well informed: For example, anyone who sees the gas shortage coming as a result of the Ukraine war early on invests in a heat pump when installers are still making appointments and there are no delivery bottlenecks. Still, we don’t seem to be blindly chasing every piece of information. We often ignore what weighs us down.

People weigh carefully what information they want

For example, despite a family history, one in ten adults does not want to know whether they have deadly Huntington’s disease and do not want to be tested for this hereditary disease. That’s what a Canadian study found. Likewise, one in five adults in Malawi does not want to know the result of an HIV test, even if money is paid for it. This deliberate ignoring of important information seems paradoxical at first glance, but is subject to its own logic.

Gerd Gigerenzer from the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin examined what this looks like. In his study “Cassandra’s regret: The psychology of not wanting to know”, published in 2017 in the “Psychological Review” journal appeared, he sheds light on the phenomenon of willful ignorance. “We humans weigh very carefully which information we collect and which we don’t,” says Gigerenzer. This contradicts the classic economic perspective on decision-making processes. This assumes that people always obtain all information that concerns them, insofar as the search costs are not too high.

For his study, the researcher asked more than a thousand adults in personal interviews: Would you like to know today when your partner will die? The result: Between 86 and 90 percent of people said they didn’t want to know, even though it would open up the possibility of using the remaining time more efficiently: for example, working less and spending more time with the family. How is that explained?

According to Gigerenzer, the degree of anticipated remorse decides whether we want to know something or not. Regret comes over people when they choose option A only to find out that option B would have been better. Keyword supermarket line: those who stoically stay in line assume that they will regret it if they switch. That’s why they stop.

Costs and benefits are weighed against each other

There are some things we just don’t want to find out. The more consequential and complex the knowledge, the more difficult it is to weigh it up. Parenting is such an example: men can never be sure if they are the biological father of their child. In this respect, the question arises for many: Do I really want to know that?

In Gerd Gigerenzer’s survey, 38 percent of men without children stated that they would insist on a DNA test in the event of paternity. However, among those who had children, only 4 percent said they had actually taken a test. “The behavior shows that the men are weighing things up,” says Gigerenzer. For example, the partner could interpret insisting on a paternity test as a breach of trust. There is also the possibility that the test will not turn out as desired. In this case, this would have an impact on the relationship with the woman and the child.

The answers are offset against the benefit of knowing for sure about paternity. If the benefits outweigh the risks, those affected want to take a paternity test. If costs dominate, they decide against the test. In order to carry out this calculation mentally, however, those affected must be able to mentally anticipate negative emotions.

One could also say that anticipating regret means subtracting the best-case emotional scenario from the worst-case scenario. If mentally negative emotions remain, those affected choose not to know. In the case of paternity, this seems to promise more life satisfaction. “This contradicts all theories that assume that more information is always better,” says Gerd Gigerenzer. Normally, scientists assume that when faced with a choice, people prefer to know to not to know.

Conscious ignorance depends on age and personality

In his study, Gigerenzer found that risk-averse people in particular tend to willfully ignore them. People who take out supplementary insurance, such as legal protection insurance, are also more prone to willful ignoring. After all, taking out insurance means giving preference to foreseeable regular costs over uncertain unforeseeable costs. In view of the destructive potential of some truths, conscious ignorance acts like a protection against an emotional total loss.

Love affairs, for example, have the potential to blow up whole families when the truth comes out. But the older people are, the less they want to know about infidelity, which is why they avoid explosive knowledge. Ralph Hertwig, a psychologist at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin, and his colleagues discovered this connection last year.

The researchers published a 2021 study, Age Differences in Deliberate Ignorance, in the journal “Psychology and Aging” appeared, a representative sample of 1910 inhabitants from Germany was confronted with 13 scenarios. The participants answered questions about their partner’s fidelity, a relative’s possible Nazi past, or their colleague’s bonus payment.

This study showed that not only older people tend to not know, but also closed ones because they are less receptive to new, challenging thoughts. Hertwig and his team therefore initially assumed that older people had a greater tendency not to want to know because they were less open-minded. In fact, the results showed no statistical association between openness to new thoughts and a person’s age.

So it had to be something else: In the end, the researchers found out that people’s priorities shift as they get older. According to socioemotional selectivity theory, young people tend to aim for future-oriented goals. Older people, on the other hand, prefer present-oriented goals, such as psychological well-being.

So it could also be seen as a sign of emotional maturity not wanting to process certain information. “The idea that a burning instinct of curiosity drives us in every situation in life – this topos of the insatiable thirst for knowledge – is wrong,” says Hertwig. The relationship between wanting to know and not wanting to know is much more complex.