For various reasons there are plenty of things that people are happy to stay in the dark about. Christmas presents, movie spoilers, the sex of their unborn baby, or even when they might die - people simply don't want to know.
Although deliberate ignorance can have sometimes dire consequences, and more so during a pandemic and an era of rampant misinformation, it's by no means rare.
In fact, it's an active choice that many people make every day.
Psychologist Jennifer Howell has tested deliberate ignorance in the lab and uncovered many curious findings. She has found for example, 80 percent of people don't want to be told how a movie will end, while around 75 percent of people don't want to know if their partner has had thoughts of cheating on them, even if they don't go through with it.
Professor Howell tells Sunday Morning people choose ignorance for different reasons, but many times it's to preserve a sense of security and happiness, with both good and bad consequences.
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She says she has always been interested in the human gymnastics the mind engages in to keep believing what we want to believe, and continuing what we want to do, despite the potential fallout.
“My research broadly focuses on the techniques we use to defend against those psychological threats and I really see the choice not to know as one of those techniques,” she says.
There are many things people simply don't want to know in life, some simple and some profound.
“There are a couple of things – narrative spoilers are one of them. We see that in about 85-to-90 percent of people really don’t want to know the ending of a story," she says.
“People don’t really want to know what their parents get up to in the bedroom. A lot of people avoid knowing what the nutritional facts about the sweet they just ate.”
The nature of things people don’t want to know vary in perniciousness. “We see that 40 percent of Americans don’t want to know their risk for cancer,” she says.
Within marriage and partners this tendency to avoid knowing the truth extends to issues of infidelity and sexual history.
“A lot people don’t want to know if they have feelings for somebody else and is not going to act on them. There’s actually a small number of people who would rather not know if their partner is prejudiced, racist, sexist or homophobic, which is an interesting one for me.”
Relationship issues are complex and many times a partner would not want to know something about a partner that would only hurt and destroy their lives.
"There was a story back to 2011 about an Italian man in his 90s and he found love letters that his wife had written to another man in the 1940s and he promptly divorced her at age 96 or something," she says.
"So, you could see how maybe his life would have been better not knowing that, or maybe he wouldn’t want to know, but when he found out he felt like he had to do something.”
Self-esteem and a sense of how other people perceive us can often determine what we want to know, particularly among the young. University students were found to not want to know if others found them attractive or not.
Powell puts this finding down to context and whether or not the space is safe for people to know, to avoid feeling judged or objectified. Posting photos on social media often comes with an evaluative threat for some, while others desire this information, she says.
“In the early days of pre-social media there was a website called hotornot.com. People could post their pictures on there and people would vote if they were hot or not. I would never, ever do that. But I thought that it was really interesting that people wanted this information.”
Not wanting to know about the foibles and personal details of our parents is common and this doesn’t change that much as we get older, she says.
“People want to preserve certain mental images of their parents as super strong, non-sexual beings. But I will say people seem to become slightly more open to the extent that they feel like they can help handle problems.”
She says somebody who is 20 may not want to know about their parents’ financial woes, whereas somebody older with a stable job and a salary, may feel they can handle that information and be able to help.
“Also, if your parents are passed on it might be easier to find out some information about them but also you may really want to avoid other information like they cheated on your other parent.”
Disclosure between a parent and their child may also bring them closer, Powell says.
“What’s really important is do you see your parents as an infallible protector or as humans with flaws and have this sense that sharing your flaws can bring you closer and help you solve your issues.
“I don’t have any specific research on this, but what we do see is the motive that underlies not wanting to know things about your parents – and we also see this with parents not wanting to know things about their children, particularly sex lives – it comes down to not wanting to shatter an image.”
Knowing when our death was going to take place is a detail most of us would like to avoid. But not always and Powell points out context is important.
“In studies of oncologists dealing with terminal cancer one of the first questions that people ask is ‘how much time to I have’," she says.
“So, what that speaks to is there really is this circumstance, a situational thing where. I don’t want to know the exact date of my death right now, perhaps because I see that as the future, I don’t see it as eminently looming and I just feel like it would disrupt my life until then and I wouldn’t be able to fully enjoy it.
“Whereas there may be a time when it’s really nice to know. If I’m going to die within the next two months I want to prepare and do the things I want to do with the loved ones before I die.”
On a more trivial matter of sport, results or outcomes being known before fans have seen the game itself, or the boxing bout, is something that riles many. Powell says this is because sport is part of their core identity and the thrill of the experience is gone when a result is known beforehand.
On the other end of the spectrum there are people who want to know everything all of the time. Those people kind to be more uncomfortable with or intolerant of uncertainty, and possibly a little more neurotic, she says.
“There are definitely measurable individual differences in how much people want information. Some people want to learn everything they can all the time, even to the detriment of their well-being and other people never want to know anything all of the time, even to the detriment of their wellbeing.”
Our genetic make-up is now knowable and so too our susceptibility to diseases like dementia. She says 25 to 50 percent of people will avoid this information.
Our knowledge of other people too is managed in a way to protects friendships and our perceptions of others.
“This is one of these places where I’d rather not know the full history of everyone I interact with. It’s much easier to like somebody who has some unsavoury parts of their past if you don’t know those things.”
The Thomas Grey adage that ignorance is bliss rings true in some respects in her research.
“There are a lot of things that knowing them will harm us, change our behaviour. Not knowing can keep us happy and feeling good about ourselves, allow to do what we want to do without thinking too much,” she says.
Classic examples of this would be the environment impact of oil and petroleum products and how our travel activities make matters worse. She says those who want to live a ‘happy’ life sometimes choose ignorance to avoid adjusting their lives.
