The Psychology of not wanting to know (2017) [pdf]

I’m really confused why the authors barely mention *agency*: knowing is fine and useful if you _can do_ something about it. Cassandra’s curse was not to know but that she wouldn’t be believed. Every circumstances that I can think of regretting knowing something (friends who were going to separate, systemic racism in algorithm that my team implemented, global warming), how certain I am is far less important than whether I can do something about it.

The paper mentions Kruglanski &amp; Webster[1] which is good, but somehow misses their 1994 paper &quot;Individual differences in need for cognitive closure.&quot;[2] The latter develops the Need For Closure Scale(NFCS) which is available online[3]. The NFCS exemplifies some of the aspects of the needs for cognitive closure.<p>&gt; 21(d) In most social conflicts, I can easily see which side is right and which is wrong.<p>&gt; 30(d) I dislike it when a person&#x27;s statement could mean many different things.<p>&gt; 32(a) I find that establishing a consistent routine enables me to enjoy life more.<p>I&#x27;d even go so far to say that by not assessing the paper&#x27;s subjects using NFCS the authors made a massive oversight.<p>If the subject interests you, I recommend reading the sources. They aren&#x27;t too hard to follow, but if you&#x27;re someone who is unfamiliar with the limitations of developing a psychological assessment instrument, you might have to put aside your need for cognitive closure for a bit while reading them.<p>1. Kruglanski, A. W., &amp; Webster, D. M. (1996). Motivated closing of the mind: “Seizing” and “freezing.” Psychological Review, 103, 263–283. <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;dx.doi.org&#x2F;10.1037&#x2F;0033-295X.103.2.263" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;dx.doi.org&#x2F;10.1037&#x2F;0033-295X.103.2.263</a><p>2. Webster, D. M., &amp; Kruglanski, A. W. (1994). Individual differences in need for cognitive closure. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 67(6), 1049–1062.<p>3. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.kruglanskiarie.com&#x2F;_files&#x2F;ugd&#x2F;1b977d_8ef6f17f4f814d9683acd822ecc9062e.pdf" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.kruglanskiarie.com&#x2F;_files&#x2F;ugd&#x2F;1b977d_8ef6f17f4f8...</a>

Am I the only one who can&#x27;t understand how Cassandra could foresee the future - but somehow failed to see that Apollo is about to curse her?!<p>I mean - WTF?!<p>The damn god is about to turn her life into living hell, she&#x27;s more then capable of actually knowing it in advance and do something about it, and she&#x27;s like &quot;Nah, I&#x27;ll just go shoppin&#x27; for a new tunic&quot;?!<p>I&#x27;m telling you - those subtle inconsistencies make me doubt this whole greek mythology thing...

This can sometimes be intentional and driven by situational circumstance. I’ve seen this in an incident response setting where people at all levels didn’t want to know as they’d be obliged to deal with it then. Peoples ethics extended so far as if they didn’t have actual evidence of a thing then it wasn’t a thing. This was driven by the finder being the one that had to fix it. So especially likely to occur to talented people and those with initiative as they’d be the ones that have to deal with it.

I&#x27;ve pondered: if you were given an envelope, written inside it is the deepest and darkest secret of the universe&#x2F;humanity, would you want to read it? It could say that we&#x27;re just in a simulation, it could say all politicians are aliens, it could say we&#x27;re totally alone in the universe because any sufficiently advanced planet destroys itself from the inside, it could say all your family and friends are just Synths and You&#x27;re in a Truman show scenario. Or something worse we can&#x27;t imagine. If you read it and found out something like this you&#x27;d go crazy.

Interesting discussion here:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.mpg.de&#x2F;16834860&#x2F;interview-deliberate-ignorance" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.mpg.de&#x2F;16834860&#x2F;interview-deliberate-ignorance</a><p>For example:<p>&gt; &quot;We distinguish between at least six functions of deliberate ignorance. One important function is regulating emotions. Not knowing certain facts can help us avoid negative emotions. For example, some people consciously make the decision not to view their &quot;Stasi&quot; (State Security Service of the GDR) files because they fear they might contain information that would make them extremely upset or sad. Such as a friend or a relative may have collaborated with the Stasi. Another function is to preserve suspense and surprise: When we read a detective story, we typically do not want to know in advance how the story ends.&quot;<p>They also discuss how blind auditions for orchestras result in a much broader group of people being hired as musicians (basically it&#x27;s anti-discriminatory wrt non-relevant factors), and also, the Twitter effect:<p>&gt; &quot;In 2018, an investigation found that false information spreads more quickly and more widely on Twitter than genuine facts. Scientists suspect that the reason for this is that false information appeals to our emotions and often surprises us and defies our expectations. And initially, everything that&#x27;s contrary to our expectations is interesting to us. We need to know this! That&#x27;s where deliberate ignorance can help us to build up a cognitive defence to protect us against being inundated with false information.&quot;

I can&#x27;t say there are many things I do not want to know, but there are things I do not want to see like videos&#x2F;photos of deadly car crashes, war battles, murders, etc.<p>So I also never watch &quot;slasher&quot; movies&#x2F;TV, or read books that depict graphic violence&#x2F;gore.<p>I&#x27;m not squeamish, I have raised, slaughtered, and dressed livestock since I was a teen. That&#x27;s never been a source of &quot;fun&quot; for me though. It has a real life purpose and the end result has always been a much improved source of food for my family and I.<p>I seldom watch anything on TV that has any violence at all and to be honest I&#x27;m a bit leery of those who go out of their way, like to a movie theater, to see it. I&#x27;m 62 and this something I&#x27;ve done since a was a teen.<p>I just don&#x27;t want those images in my memory. I&#x27;ve never looked into it but my gut feeling is they desensitize us. Looking at the current state of the obsession with owning arms designed specifically to murder humans compared to when I was growing up, I think there is ample proof of that.

This is a huge problem nowadays. I think pretty much everyone has been in such situation... This makes me cynical about WTF must be going on at the top to require so many people to &#x27;not want to know.&#x27;<p>We have a hierarchy made up of layers upon layers of &quot;I don&#x27;t want to know&quot; and people rise to a level proportional to what they are comfortable knowing (and keeping secret).

There&#x27;s a very, very good reason for not wanting to know, and undercover organizations (legal or otherwise) have always exploited it:<p>You can&#x27;t spill what you don&#x27;t know. If you&#x27;re an illegal or espionage group, your members can&#x27;t be threatened or tortured into giving up information they don&#x27;t have. Similarly, they can&#x27;t give it to WikiLeaks.

An interesting consideration here that I don&#x27;t see mentioned in the comments is the difference between the destination and the _journey_.<p>The paper asks, &quot;would you want to know during the wedding ceremony whether your marriage is going to end in divorce?&quot; There are 4 reasons offered for not wanting to know (&quot;to avoid the negative emotions, to maintain the positive emotions of surprise, to gain a strategic advantage, to implement fairness&quot;) but my reason would be this: there is a difference between knowing the outcome, and knowing _why_. And there is a difference between being able to express _why_, and truly feeling it and accepting it. And I don&#x27;t think there is any way to get there other than through living it.<p>The human mind and our capacity to learn&#x2F;grow is incredible, but we only learn and accept things when we are ready to. Sometimes you learn a little too late (e.g. after your divorce) what it means to be a present partner, but that doesn&#x27;t mean you didn&#x27;t learn it as _soon as you could_. And no knowing the future can change that. I mean, how many of us have been told over and over that we should be grateful for something (e.g. our parents, our partners, our jobs) but only truly learned the lesson once we lost it?<p>Sometimes I think we have too myopic a view of what &quot;knowing&quot; really means.

Sorry for not reading past the first page, so maybe their conclusion is the same, but: in the case of the HIV test, it&#x27;s pretty clear that people avoid it because the mere thought forces you to confront the possibility, and that is tough. At least that was my experience, even though I rationally knew that it was better to know, boy was it tempting to not pick up the result.<p>Another interesting tangent on it is that I got my results the same day, but there are places where they make you wait for a week, just so you think about it.

In a paper called “Cassandra;s regret - a paper in the journal of psychology review” written by Gerd Gigerrenzer he mentions the prevalence of People ignoring mostly to maintain a potential upside due to surprise and also the negative emotions associated with knowing something they didn’t want to know. People prefer to be in a state of active ignorance even when information is freely available. 85-95% of people don’t want to know about potential upcoming negative events. Deliberate ignorance to maintain positive emotions is more prevalent than earlier expected.

Is knowing the same thing as believing? Maybe I&#x27;m missing something, but a lot of this seems to hinge on an assumption that knowing something with absolute certainty is possible, and a meaningful hypothetical scenario in our human cognition.<p>Predictions (knowing) and their ensuing actions in a non-deterministic world are not necessarily isolated from the eventual outcome. I&#x27;m curious how much of the &quot;willful ignorance&quot; is actually avoidance of some sort of self-fulfilling prophecy.

Timely article — I can’t help but to relate it to my investing&#x2F;stock account lol. I’m mostly invested in big tech and not so much growth — so things probably aren’t so bad — still, I haven’t checked that account in a couple months. I have it set up to make recurring purchases in things like Apple, so I’m just waiting it out and hoping that the old adage “time in the market beats timing the market” holds true.

One more motive, archivable under &quot;plot twist&quot; meme: what seems like relevant information is actually a lie, amplified by the echo chamber.<p>Maybe you can spot some buzzword that has been discussed in HN for years and later diluted into irrelevance. Sometimes the next big thing, sometimes the moral panic, sometimes the impending doom. The bigger the sense of urgency, the more suspect.

This pdf is a masterpiece in the art of kerning. I had a lot of fun poking my eyes out trying to decipher the characters.

“Technological progress steadily shifts the line between the knowable and the unknowable in the direction of Cassandra’s powers. Advances in genomic analyses and biomarker research will put more and more people into situations where they have to decide whether they want to know future health issues.” Gerd Gigerrenzer

Fascinating study although not exactly what I expected ( I thought it would be about brain deliberately ignoring information and not allowing it to pass for conscious consideration ). Naturally, this is a little different.<p>What is more interesting is that based on the study only tiny fraction of population wants to know regardless.

This is very relevant during this large crypto correction.<p>Nobody wants to know that BTC will reach $3,000 within 1-2 years.

Sometime it&#x27;s good to if you don&#x27;t know the details, it helps to analyze the problem at high level and might result in creative solutions because you don&#x27;t get caught into details since you don&#x27;t know it. But it&#x27;s not good always.

ignorance is a bliss

Ayn Rand called not wanting to know the &quot;blank-out&quot; and identified <i>evasion</i> as the root of all evil.<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;aynrandlexicon.com&#x2F;lexicon&#x2F;evasion.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;aynrandlexicon.com&#x2F;lexicon&#x2F;evasion.html</a>