Motivated Ignorance
Posted by The Situationist Staff on December 20, 2011
From EENews:
For many people, ignorance is bliss when it comes to vexing issues like climate change, according to a new study.
Published last month in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, the report shows that people who know very little about an issue — say the economic downturn, changes in the climate or dwindling fossil fuel reserves — tend to avoid learning more about it. This insulates them in their ignorance — a pattern described by researchers as “motivated avoidance.”
Faced with complicated or troubling situations, these people often defer to authorities like the government or scientists, hoping they have the situation under control.
“Our research suggests that this kind of overwhelmed feeling, and feeling that an issue is ‘above one’s head’ leads people to feel dependent on the government, and this dependence is managed by trusting the government more to deal with an issue, and this is managed by avoiding the issue,” explained Steven Shepherd, a social psychology doctoral student at the University of Waterloo in Canada and an author of the report, in an email.
“This is psychologically easier than taking a significant amount of time to learn about an issue, all the while confronting unpleasant information about it,” he added.
The report used survey data from 511 participants between 2010 and 2011. “In four studies we manipulated how we framed a domain like the economy or energy (e.g., simple or complex), and in the one study, we manipulated whether or not a future oil shortage was said to be an immediate problem, or a distant future problem,” Shepherd said.
The researchers found that people who received complex information on an issue felt more helpless and more trusting in government compared to those who received relatively simple explanations. In addition, people who felt ignorant on a certain topic — especially issues with dire consequences like fuel shortages or climate change — would reject negative information.
But researchers say there’s more to it than just plugging your ears and saying “la la la.”
The trust-and-avoid ploy
Motivated avoidance stems from a phenomenon known as system justification. “It refers to a motivation that most people hold to believe that the systems that they function with are legitimate,” explained [Situationist Contributor] Aaron Kay, another author. Kay, who is an associate professor of psychology and neuroscience at Duke University, explained that people working within a government agency or large institution can’t really influence the collective group on their own.
So they are inclined to conclude the group largely knows what it’s doing. “It doesn’t always imply that people think this is good, but they think it’s better than the government not being in control,” he said. To maintain this view, he noted, people will deliberately avoid information that contradicts it.
“Climate change is a global issue that, seemingly, is beyond the efforts of any one individual. … I think a lot of people feel unable to do anything about it,” said Shepherd. “The next best thing is to either deny it, or defer the issue to governments to deal with it. … In our research we find that one easy way to maintain that psychologically comforting trust that an issue is being dealt with is to simply avoid the issue.”
The authors also speculate that political leanings play into whether people want to trust politicians handle climate change. “I think we see this in the recent ‘Occupy’ movements, and among those pushing for governments to do more about climate change,” Shepherd said.
“People who simply distrust the government to begin with, or libertarians who prefer to have as little government involvement in their lives as possible, are also unlikely to respond to feeling dependent on the government by trusting in them more.”
Related Situationist posts:
- Self-Fulfilling Doomsday Prophecies
- Aaron Kay, “The Psychological Power of the Status Quo”
- Warming World or Just World?
- Value-Affirmation, and the Situation of Climate Change Beliefs,
- Global Climate Change and The Situation of Denial,
- Al Gore – The Situationist,
- The Situation of Climate Change,
- Getting a Grip on Climate Change,
- Denial,
- Thanksgiving as ‘System Justification,
- Captured Science,
- The Psychological Situation of Climate Change
- The Situation of Climate Change, and
- The Heat is On.
The Situationist 
Dr. Tim Hadley said
The report you discuss unfairly implies that people who don’t agree with the climate-change agenda are ignorant. But, as your column illustrates, “motivated ignorance” works both ways. Sure, sometimes people who _deny_ are the ignorant ones. But ignorance is also found in those who _accept_ unproven speculations and unprovable theories, especially when the accepters are “motivated” by large financial grants. Political motivations go both directions, too, a fact that unbiased and truly scholarly researchers would know and acknowledge.