Killing three hours at Copenhagen Airport in between flights last week, I was in a muddle what to write for my next piece in The Journal. After going through several burning issues, I decided to address one of the root causes of most of the existing and upcoming social troubles  – Ignorance! Not only does it underlie many of the controversies we have at the moment but it is one of the most under-identified social problems itself.

So what is Ignorance?  The dictionary definition is “a lack of knowledge, information, or education.” While being ignorant is a state of being unaware, it often includes the refusal to learn and upgrade yourself.  In Maltese, ignorant (“injurant”) is often equated with being stupid, but one can be ignorant without being stupid at all.

In our everyday lives, we are ignorant about a lot of things ranging from being unaware of our own households and work environments to being oblivious about our social surroundings. 

In this age where information about the world is accessible in a click of our fingers, Ignorance is not an excuse; it’s a choice! Being blindly led by beliefs and ego is a prime cause of ignorance. Stuck in their own understanding, ignorant people are often problematic for the well-being of society.

We just don’t want to know

It has long been assumed that humans have a boundless thirst for knowledge. But there are some things that people just do not want to know. Deliberate ignorance — the decision not to know — has recently received growing attention in psychology, economics, the social sciences, and public policy making.

Facing information about their past decisions and behaviour that could have ramifications for their present and future, many people have decided they simply do not want to know.

Any society experiencing a fundamental transition — moving from war to peace, from dictatorship to democracy, or from liberal democracy to authoritarianism — must develop a way to interpret, remember, or ignore past experiences in order to legitimise present and future choices.

Collective memory regimes

Collective memory regimes are formed, interpreted, and disseminated by collective bodies and institutions according to their interests. In memory politics, which deals with “who wants whom to remember what, and why”, there are various approaches.

At one end of the spectrum, deliberately ignoring the misdeeds of the past – the Catholic Church’s interdiction of Labourites for their beliefs and challenging clerical power, or the use of violence for political purposes – in order to stabilise power and avoid conflict.

At the other end of the spectrum,  remembering misdeeds – the killing of Daphne Caruana Galizia, the fraud of the Vitals/Steward Health deal – in order to pursue justice and prevent the illegal behaviours from recurring.

These two approaches can also blend and coexist in hybrid regimes of remembering certain crimes and ignoring others.  Some historical periods are associated more closely with one or the other approach. For instance, in post-Communist society, societies in ex-members of the Soviet bloc approached memory politics with a focus on forgetting and the choice to not know.

A collective veil of ignorance was seen as indispensable for a new order in which perpetrators, followers, and victims of the old system could coexist – the former East Germany. Investigating, publicising, sanctioning, or even acknowledging the sins of the Communist regime and the Stasi risked perpetual discord, and so only the elites of the defeated regime were held accountable.

On the other hand, the French Revolution, which led to the codification of human rights, was key for the remembrance approach, where present and future generations must know and remember the past to avoid repeating it. Human rights violations were seen as crimes to be prosecuted rather than ignored.

Although remembrance is one of the models of memory politics (e.g., establishing truth commissions has become “almost routine and standard practice”), a range of approaches can be seen in modern societies. For example, whereas South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission investigated human rights violations perpetrated during apartheid, post-Franco Spain granted blanket amnesty to both the perpetrators and victims of Francoist repression.

Change over time

The approach itself may change over time: Germany wished to ‘forget’ its responsibility for the horrors of the Holocaust in the decades immediately after World War II, but from the late 1960s onwards a culture of remembrance developed within the country and beyond.

People’s individual choices as how to deal with the past evolve against the background of collective memory politics. However, we know all too little about how societal transformations impact individual decisions on whether and how to remember the past.

One can only fully understand remembrance dynamics in periods of social transition if one considers personal choices and how they relate to the prevailing memory politics: How do people decide whether or not to engage with the past and what role do change and stability in the social and political environment play in these decisions?

Deliberate ignorance

As a first step toward addressing these questions, it is important to note an important psychological phenomenon on the individual level: deliberate ignorance – the personal choice not to know in situations where the marginal acquisition costs of the information are relatively small but the potential benefits are large.

This choice echoes aspects of collective memory politics at the individual level. However, it is likely to be influenced not by the possible repercussions the knowledge could have on society, but by the potential effects on the individual and his/her family, friends, and colleagues.

To give some examples, take an uncle who believes vaccines cause autism but refuses to study the volumes of research showing them to be safe. Or how about a friend who avoids information about factory animal farming so they can eat cheap meat guilt-free? Or what about that CEO who claims their food delivery platform is ethically minded, yet doesn’t investigate its providers for exploitation of Nepalese or Pakistani immigrants?

Each is an example of what psychologists call ‘wilful ignorance’ — the intentional act of avoiding information that reveals the negative consequences of one’s actions. Not to judge is what we do in our lives when we look the other way and pretend everything is fine. It may be personal, political, or professional in nature, but just below the conscious surface, we know our actions don’t align with our stated values.

“Examples [of] wilful ignorance abound in everyday life,” says Linh Vu, a doctoral candidate at the University of Amsterdam. To find out, Vu and a team of researchers performed the first analysis on the current empirical evidence of wilful ignorance, and it was published in the Psychological Bulletin. They compared the results of 22 studies with a total of more than 6,000 participants. 

The moral wiggle room task

The classic experiment for studying wilful ignorance is known as the moral wiggle room task. It was designed by Jason Dana, an associate professor of marketing and management at Yale. Participants are randomly assigned the role of donor or recipient. The donor is given a choice: he can take either a $5 or $6 payout. If he takes the $5 payout, the recipient will receive $5 as well. If he takes the $6 payout, the recipient will receive $1.

When provided with this information by a researcher, the majority of donors act altruistically. They sacrifice the slightly larger payout for themselves to give the recipients more money. On average, only about a quarter of donors act selfishly.

In a further experiment, the donors could still choose between the $5 or $6 payouts, but this time they were not told what the recipients would receive. There’s a 50-50 chance the recipients will receive $5 or $1. Importantly, the donors can ask the researchers what payout the recipients will receive, and they can do so at no cost to themselves. In other words, while the donors start out blind to the consequences of their actions, they don’t have to stay that way if they don’t want to.

In the second experiment, 44% of donors chose to remain wilfully ignorant and took the selfish option. That wilful ignorance was correlated with less altruism: people were 15.6 percentage points more likely to be generous to someone else when they were told the consequences of their choice compared with when they were allowed to remain ignorant.

Some studies in the meta-analysis were variations on this original design. But across all the studies, the researchers found the split to be fairly consistent. On average, 40% of people chose not to learn about the consequences of their actions, and such ignorance was associated with less altruism compared to those who became informed.

The authors conclude that “taken together, the aggregate evidence suggests ignorance is indeed in part ‘wilful’ and driven by excuse-seeking and self-image maintenance motives.” Thanks to them, we are all a little less ignorant about ignorance.

The researchers hypothesised that one reason for wilful ignorance might be that some people behave altruistically because they want to maintain a positive self-image of being an altruistic person. In those cases, wilful ignorance can allow them to maintain that self-image without having to act in an altruistic way.

So, people can act altruistically because of  societal pressures as well as out of a desire to view themselves in a good light. However, being righteous is often costly, demanding people to give up their time, money and effort; ignorance offers an easy way out.

Altruistic behaviours

The meta-analysis backed that up, according to study co-author Shaul Shalvi, PhD, a professor of behavioural ethics at the University of Amsterdam. That’s because people who chose to learn the consequences of their action were seven percentage points more likely to be generous compared with participants who were given information by default. It seemed that truly altruistic people choose to learn the consequences of their actions.

“The findings are fascinating as they suggest a lot of the altruistic behaviours we observe are driven by a desire to behave as others expect us to,” Shalvi said. “While most people are willing to do the right thing when they are fully informed of the consequences of their actions, this willingness is not always because people care for others.

When ignorance is bliss

Ignorance is bliss when it comes to challenging social issues. The fewer people know about important and complex social issues, the better. The more urgent the matter, the lesser people want to address it and become well-informed citizens. In my opinion, there are a couple of causes that lead to this Ignorance.

If an individual is aware of the issue, they may somehow feel responsible for taking action on it. To avoid bearing this responsibility they choose the easy road of Ignorance. 

Another reason why individuals choose to be ignorant is because they fear knowing and growing. Ignorance shields them from learning the reality of events. But by ignoring the problem, they give it even more power.

Avoiding responsability

These reasons explain why people ignore the gravity of social issues such as the economy, energy consumption, sustainability, and the environment.

Just learning the magnitude of such issues will require the individuals to take responsibility and act conservatively. For example, since Covid, people have found it convenient to have their morning coffee or lunchtime snack delivered by food delivery platforms, but they are blissfully ignorant that the courier is a Nepalese working 70 hours a week for less than the minimum wage.

Climate change should be the biggest concern of mankind considering that, if it is not controlled, we might not have a planet to live in. Meanwhile, people heedlessly use the very limited resources (energy for air-conditioning) causing irreparable damage to the climate. 

The ubiquity of Ignorance causes problems like racism and gender discrimination. Ignorance of each other’s rights. Ignorance of one’s duties. Ignorance of science that could solve world problems. Ignorance of the fact that a fertility rate of 1.46 means that the Maltese people will be decimated in a few hundred generations!

Social issues

Such ignorance gives birth to many social issues. Let us take a few examples:

Sexual assault/domestic violence

Ignorance of our one’s own duties and denial of the victim’s rights is the ultimate cause of horrific problems such as sexual assault and domestic violence. The perpetrator’s awareness of the victim’s rights and his/her own duties could put an end to such atrocious crimes.

Racism and gender discrimination

We were all created as equals. Anyone who creates differences does so by ignoring the uniqueness of each person, and most importantly by ignoring the basic human rights of that person.

Environmental degradation

We must respect and cherish all that is given by mother nature. But excessive human wants ignore the extent to which the environment can be used before it ends up degraded.

It is something similar with resolving the social issues. If we do not understand what causes these issues we will never be able to put it to right. 

To be able to gain success at the forefront of solving such issues we must attack at its base too. The base of such issues is the ignorance of basic duties, responsibility, and science by the people. Once each of us is fully aware of the same there will be no differences. And once we wipe out this disparity in the society, solving the social issue will be like pushing an open door!