The Psychology of not wanting to know (2017) [pdf] | Hacker News Reader

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

apa.org

130 pointsamitmina76 comments

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.

Good point. But there are Knowledge Hazards that stand alone. Such as traumatic images you cannot unsee. A lot of people who work in digital forensics would love a zero knowledge proof that a folder is full of CP without having to look at it. That's pretty much the idea of the CSAM algorithm Apple wanted to push, which makes it a pretty great idea minus the digitally rapey forcing it on people without their consent bit.

> "Only 1% of participants consistently wanted to know"

Wow! I sometimes feel "better not to know" but for the most-part I am scientific/rationalist and will take all the intel I can get even if it may be challenging.

There's one exception: I often deliberately don't google people I am going to meet. I want the relationship to evolve organically. If it's an interview I might check a bit on their professional background, and the orgs they've worked with, but even given the opportunity to see a much deeper dox I'll pass on it. I feel it's degrading. Also that it may give me a false impression that excludes opportunities. I would only break that "polite ignorance" if I needed to assess the risk of someone or suspected a problem.

That last part is quite important; we've lost the ability to lose things to time, and it can be brought back up quite easily.

Part of it has been loss in trust of the people in society setup as gatekeepers, but the "cure" of everyone doing it themselves may be worse than the disease.

That theme, of whether the age of 'benevolent elites' has given way to a hyper-liberal vigilantism (and whether that's worse) is explored quite nicely by Adam Curtis in some of his more recent films.

In the case of CSAM, I think you are conflating not wanting to see, which I appreciate, and wanting, needing really, to know to make decision.

Knowing gives agency, the ability ot fight a crime in that case. People who are exposed to it suffer less from being exposed to it and more from the inability to see the flow stop.

Yes I agree. We've come full circle back to Cassandra. The thing with cybersecurity that infuriates me with frustration is telling people the things they don't want to know yet knowing I am powerless to stop them harming themselves and others with stubbornly bad choices. I'm sure healthcare professionals get the same. It's why I wrote in Digital Vegan quite a lot about drug addiction and technology.

I see two distinct motivations for not wanting to know:

- You have no agency, so the information would just be depressing without enabling you to do something about it.

- You have agency, and indeed you'd have to do something if you knew (for moral, legal or general responsibility reasons) - but you don't _want_ to do anything.

The second is common, especially when dealing with a bureaucracy that isn't fully aligned with what should be done. As long as you maintain plausible deniability, things continue to work.

Hence things like "work to rule" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Work-to-rule

Agency can be a burden: knowing about something and also knowing that you can do something about it, but that there is a cost to doing something about it, can expose serious deficiencies in human beings (gross cowardice in particular).

Churches with serial molesters as priests are a rather grim example: apparently quite a few people knew what was going on in many (most?) of these cases, but the cost of taking action was viewed as being too detrimental to the image of the church, so, they let it continue. This kind of behavior was also seen with those FBI agents and internal executives who were informed about the USA Gymnast's serial child predator by some of the victims (the FBI is now facing a $1 billion lawsuit for negligence, a case worth watching):

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/wait-happened-larry-nassar-co...

This is why higher-ups in organizations often don't want to get memos from middle managers about problems lower down, because then they lose the 'plausible deniability' defense when it comes to a criminal prosecution or a civil court case.

The paper mentions Kruglanski & Webster[1] which is good, but somehow misses their 1994 paper "Individual differences in need for cognitive closure."[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.

> 21(d) In most social conflicts, I can easily see which side is right and which is wrong.

> 30(d) I dislike it when a person's statement could mean many different things.

> 32(a) I find that establishing a consistent routine enables me to enjoy life more.

I'd even go so far to say that by not assessing the paper's subjects using NFCS the authors made a massive oversight.

If the subject interests you, I recommend reading the sources. They aren't too hard to follow, but if you'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.

1. Kruglanski, A. W., & Webster, D. M. (1996). Motivated closing of the mind: “Seizing” and “freezing.” Psychological Review, 103, 263–283. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/0033-295X.103.2.263

2. Webster, D. M., & Kruglanski, A. W. (1994). Individual differences in need for cognitive closure. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 67(6), 1049–1062.

3. https://www.kruglanskiarie.com/_files/ugd/1b977d_8ef6f17f4f8...

> but somehow misses their 1994 paper

Link to PDF of article for [2]

— Rather ironically, you seem to have missed it, and I needed the closure!

http://www.communicationcache.com/uploads/1/0/8/8/10887248/i...

Am I the only one who can't understand how Cassandra could foresee the future - but somehow failed to see that Apollo is about to curse her?!

I mean - WTF?!

The damn god is about to turn her life into living hell, she's more then capable of actually knowing it in advance and do something about it, and she's like "Nah, I'll just go shoppin' for a new tunic"?!

I'm telling you - those subtle inconsistencies make me doubt this whole greek mythology thing...

Maybe her actions prevented even greater catastrophe.

I disagree.

She failed - miserably - as mount Olympus' VP of future foreseeing, and that's totally unacceptable.

Where's HR in all this? the recruiting manager!? Anyone??

Are those the kind of unrealistically supernatural powers baring individuals we want to have in our company?

I don't think so...

She must have read The Aeneid

Apollo was rejected by a mortal after giving her powers. As a god of prophecy, he should have seen that coming.

I've seen that point expressed cutely in an old goth metal lyric:

    If he did grant
    Wherefore then did
    He not foresee?
    Be like egal
    As if to him
    Might be?

I guess he preferred not to know.

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.

You see a lot of the "see no data, hear no data" in the pharma industry.

Mandatory reporting and investigation for adverse event reports means all sorts of loopholes are jumped through to avoid finding out about them.

It's messed up.

Corporate is rife with pre-meditated liability avoidance loopholes. Plausible deniability reigns supreme.

Exactly mix the plausible deniability with discovery processes and you get to the point where people couldn’t do the right thing even if they wanted to as they don’t know about it.

I can see some of it driven by situations where nothing could be done to prevent a negative outcome as well: if a death is unpreventable, what's the point in knowing it's coming? I think that's implicit in many of the events in the paper's studies (or explicit? I didnt read it carefully), this idea that they're unavoidable.

Maybe that's consistent with what you're saying, in the sense that something unavoidable has infinitely high amounts of cost associated with it in terms of rectification or prevention.

Yeah I can see that in some scenarios there’s a no win for the business or the team. Especially information spillage where the cleanup is usually non effective messy and long. Combine that with them not being interesting to work people actively avoid them.

There is an I counter example as well. Where there’s no perceived benefit however there actually is one you just didn’t realise it. Some sort of FOMO with out the fear and you do miss out.

That is so spot on.

When I was in my early teens I started working for a few small businesses that made mods to vans for people in wheelchairs to drive. I built and installed those as instructed without question.

By the time I was in my late teens I realized there were some dangerous flaws in some of the things we were doing and began pointing them out. For the most part when I did that the design was modified to address the flaw, but one time involved more than just a tweak and would've been costly and I was told "You're not qualified to evaluate this", and that was true in as much as I had no degree in engineering.

What I did have by then was years of experience with how things break and fail.

One example is a company I subcontracted work for had a design for a device that moved the driver's seat in a van backwards about two feet on a set of rails so a paraplegic could slide from the wheelchair to the drivers seat, and then move the seat forward towards the driver's controls. They wanted me to build and install them.

They used a rack gear and power window motor for a car to do this. The rack gear was made of steel, but the power window motor gear was made of plastic and cheap cast aluminum, and that plastic gear was all that was holding the driver's seat in place.

They had no kind of latch at all to hold the seat in the driver's position so it was obvious that in a rear end collision the window motor gear and housing would break and the driver would be slammed backwards about 2.5 ft and then again forwards again with great force.

They really did not want to know that, and refused to make any changes to the design. So I told the State inspector about it a few weeks later when he came to inspect a van that was finished for a client. Even though it was very simple he had no idea of how that device even worked, and told me so. So he went to the CEO of the company and told them about what I'd told him and I was fired.

They went broke less than a year later so as far as I know there were never many of those shipped.

I've pondered: if you were given an envelope, written inside it is the deepest and darkest secret of the universe/humanity, would you want to read it? It could say that we're just in a simulation, it could say all politicians are aliens, it could say we'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're in a Truman show scenario. Or something worse we can't imagine. If you read it and found out something like this you'd go crazy.

How would you know that what it says is actually true?

That seems to be stipulated as part of the thought experiment.

Otherwise, it's a different thought experiment. ;)

Nah. Even assuming it's true, I'd still be motivated by the mystery of who wrote it and why he gave it to me.

All the situations you mentioned I would want to know about.

Same. Those scenarios point to more of a "meaning of life" and "reason behind it all" types of scenarios, assuming that the message-deliverer is trustworthy/ accurate. Knowing such weighty matters might heavily shift the way you live, the choices you make, and the things you invest your energy and time into.

The universe's deepest darkest secret just sounds interesting and I must already be living with the consequences of it in some way.

I think a more localized version (your spouse or family's darkest secret) might be a more difficult decision.

I think I would like to know most of those. Except my family being fake, I guess.

If the letter told me the exact date and time of my own death, I might go crazy, though.

That's a superpower! You can be as risky as you want if you know the fixed date of your death.

How you react to knowing the date of your death influences the date of your death in the universe where you learn the date.

Now I'm imagining a tablet that continually updates with the date and time of your death. Could be an interesting short story.

Rick and Morty did something similar in the episode "Edge of Tomorty: Rick Die Rickpeat". Morty got ahold of a crystal that showed him what his final moments would look like, and the vision updated as his actions changed his future.

The mechanism behind it should be able to calculate the new date in advance though

It's already taking into account billions of variables (if the date is sufficiently far away), billions + 1 should be easy

Then the date would have to be re-calculated because knowing this new date could cause the date to change in a different way, requiring another recalculation, etc. I guess it really depends in practice, might only be a few loops before it gets stuck on one date, could see it being an infinite loop though

As soon as we know any of those truths, we can get started on the actual work of doing something about it.

Unfortunately we know exactly what’s happening: the climate is warming at a non-linear rate, chemical pollution is at or near extinction levels, fresh water supplies are becoming more scarce and privatized, the few own the majority, and war is on the horizon. What exactly are we doing about this?

The real problem is hyper-normalization. Humans will one day soon normalize their own extinction.

How many of them would be able to get by the "That's a conspiracy theory [and therefore false]!" (or newer versions like "Russian propaganda") subconscious heuristic filters that seems to have "somehow" been installed into so many minds?

"In a time of universal deceit - telling the truth is a revolutionary act." George Orwell

Interesting discussion here:

https://www.mpg.de/16834860/interview-deliberate-ignorance

For example:

> "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 "Stasi" (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."

They also discuss how blind auditions for orchestras result in a much broader group of people being hired as musicians (basically it's anti-discriminatory wrt non-relevant factors), and also, the Twitter effect:

> "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's contrary to our expectations is interesting to us. We need to know this! That's where deliberate ignorance can help us to build up a cognitive defence to protect us against being inundated with false information."

Deliberate ignorance is a way to optimize for out emotions. Most of us are still rooted in our limbic brain no matter how rational we think we are.

The blind auditions may be a bad example - or at least, may not have helped get more women hired into orchestras. The original study that posited that blind auditions greatly help women does not show strong data to support its claims and what data it does show either contradicts the claim (when confounded) or has no significant result and large error values (when unconfounded). See https://jsmp.dk/posts/2019-05-12-blindauditions/ for more details.

There are also a lot of... let's call them self-styled anti-racists who want to end blind auditions because they don't result in enough minority hires (see [0], [1], [2]) which is an interesting way to define discrimination, I suppose.

[0]: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/16/arts/music/blind-audition...

[1]: https://www.amren.com/news/2020/07/to-make-orchestras-more-d...

[2]: https://www.quora.com/Considering-that-blind-auditions-incre...

I can't say there are many things I do not want to know, but there are things I do not want to see like videos/photos of deadly car crashes, war battles, murders, etc.

So I also never watch "slasher" movies/TV, or read books that depict graphic violence/gore.

I'm not squeamish, I have raised, slaughtered, and dressed livestock since I was a teen. That's never been a source of "fun" 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.

I seldom watch anything on TV that has any violence at all and to be honest I'm a bit leery of those who go out of their way, like to a movie theater, to see it. I'm 62 and this something I've done since a was a teen.

I just don't want those images in my memory. I'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.

A different take: videos of horrible things show rare insights into behaviors that are only visible before the horrible thing. For example, how a robbery goes bad and ends up as a multiple murder. Or how someone will hide and wait to kill someone. Of course I'd rather not see that stuff in general, but more than that, I'd rather have a basic understanding of how those things play out.

> I'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

There have been studies on this and my recollection is that despite the "gut feelings" people have about this, it doesn't hold up to the level of being able to prove causation. At best, there is a level of correlation (not strong). Most I've read show that people are able to differentiate between reality and "entertainment".

I'd recommend looking into the studies that have been done (and be warned, there are also some really bad studies in this area, paid for, low sample size, etc.) Also, I fully recognize that this is an area we need more study because it's been stymied for years by various laws that prevent investment in researching anything that is in this area.

Note - I also want to clarify that I am not a gun nut or 2A absolutist or anything of that nature and not trying to dive down that rabbit hole - so not trying to defend their misplaced importance and/or misuse in any way. And I'm also not saying we should wait to try things for studies to be done. But I think it's important to know the real underlying issues so we work toward fixing the problem correctly.

I just looked into crime rates and they're actually close to historical lows.

But that's not really a measure for rather we're "desensitized", and maybe that's the wrong word for what I feel about this.

Basically, I can't imagine how consuming violent movies, games, images, music, does not affect oneself. I don't necessarily think that makes one prone to violence, but I do feel it may move them towards depression.

Have you considered spoiling the book/movie/television show after you realize it's making you anxious? If you skip parts in the middle or read the ending, your brain won't be waiting for the other shoe to drop; it'll be working on figuring out why the shoe will inevitably drop in the third act.

Parent didn't imply any anxiety issues, but you just did, and it doesn't look like a coincidence to be honest. If I calmly assume that I've seen enough of the piece of art based on a meaningful sample, it's kinda hard to maintain my interest.

I avoid even comparatively mild stuff, e.g. Godfather or Dark Knight (peeking at IMDB's top movies), and have done so for decades. It's a conscious decision, one I made in my twenties and not in any way related to aesthetics, anxiety, being childish, or mental issues.

I'm not really advocating it. I don't claim it gives superpowers or big benefits (and if anyone claims them, I'd ask for hard scientific evidence), but I can just say that any life decisions differentiate a person, even if by tiny bit. Looking at the whole population, life decisions make people diverse and drive them to bump against each other, which is mostly fun, no?

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 'not want to know.'

We have a hierarchy made up of layers upon layers of "I don't want to know" and people rise to a level proportional to what they are comfortable knowing (and keeping secret).

People willfully keeping things secret when it's not even necessary has been a huge problem in my career. I get disrespect when I want to understand why things are happening. It's not reasonable to expect the people who create software to solve problems to just blindly write code and not understand why things are done in a certain way. It's their JOB to figure things out and optimize. Asking them not to look for improvement gains is like asking a fish to stop respirating in water and move just as fast on land in air.

This is one of my go-to indicators that I'm in an IT shop where I need to leave. I'm really good at sussing out and learning systems that people are guarding for the sole reason that they want to retain the clout of being the only one who understands it. If I run into too many of those or if I need access to one to do MY job, I start tapping into my network to move on.

There's a very, very good reason for not wanting to know, and undercover organizations (legal or otherwise) have always exploited it:

You can't spill what you don't know. If you're an illegal or espionage group, your members can't be threatened or tortured into giving up information they don't have. Similarly, they can't give it to WikiLeaks.

An interesting consideration here that I don't see mentioned in the comments is the difference between the destination and the _journey_.

The paper asks, "would you want to know during the wedding ceremony whether your marriage is going to end in divorce?" There are 4 reasons offered for not wanting to know ("to avoid the negative emotions, to maintain the positive emotions of surprise, to gain a strategic advantage, to implement fairness") 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't think there is any way to get there other than through living it.

The human mind and our capacity to learn/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't mean you didn'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?

Sometimes I think we have too myopic a view of what "knowing" 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'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.

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.

This is so prevalent all around the world, that there's even a saying in my native Brazil: "You're only sick if you get tested"

I wonder how well that expression was taken in the context of COVID.

Not very well actually. that idiom is used almost exclusively in a joking manner when referring to HIV testing in specific.

That’s a very good point. I also went through this dilemma a few years ago and it was very difficult for me.

Given my personality, I always strive to do what’s right regardless of how difficult or uncomfortable it is. I can say I have ALWAYS succeeded in doing that. But a few years ago when I was in a situation where I needed to get an HIV test, I was very scared and nervous. I was sweating every now and then thinking about it. I couldn’t focus on work and I couldn’t have any fun. The only thing that helped me a little bit was to rationally predict my outcome based on statistics and past behavior.

But all in all, I trusted in the process and got myself to go through with it step by step.

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.

It's the same paper in the title

Is knowing the same thing as believing? Maybe I'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.

Predictions (knowing) and their ensuing actions in a non-deterministic world are not necessarily isolated from the eventual outcome. I'm curious how much of the "willful ignorance" is actually avoidance of some sort of self-fulfilling prophecy.

Timely article — I can’t help but to relate it to my investing/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 "plot twist" meme: what seems like relevant information is actually a lie, amplified by the echo chamber.

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.

What is more interesting is that based on the study only tiny fraction of population wants to know regardless.

For deeper learning, get a delusional spouse that ignores any reality other than the one they like.

You'll wish you ignored this line of reasoning.

This is very relevant during this large crypto correction.

Nobody wants to know that BTC will reach $3,000 within 1-2 years.

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

ignorance is a bliss

Ayn Rand called not wanting to know the "blank-out" and identified evasion as the root of all evil.

http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/evasion.html

powerful words! this encapsulates it even better

Reply on news.ycombinator.com