Homo Ignorans: Deliberately Choosing Not to Know

Follow up paper that extends the concept of identity protective cognition explaining that people avoid, neglect, and distort information to protect identity based belief systems.

The Good, Bad and Ugly of information (un)processing; Homo Economicus, Homo Heuristicus and Homo Ignorans

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01674...

Link to paper:

http://www.spp1516.de/Publikationen/pdfs/Hertwig%20&%20Engel...

If conservatives could read, they'd be very upset.

But atleast they have their bots:

The paper describes deliberate ignorance as a universal human tendency, not a partisan one. Reducing it to a conservative specific problem is ironically a good demonstration of the phenomenon.

Does the paper really claim that every one of us has this tendency to the same degree?

The framing of the whole paper makes the point implicitly. They open with Aristotle’s claim that all humans by nature desire to know, then argue the converse that choosing not to know is equally a part of human nature.

The examples they use span medical patients, Nobel laureates, lawyers, investors, and ordinary citizens across multiple countries. The paper treats it as a species level cognitive phenomenon.