Motivated ignorance, rationality, and democratic politics

Abstract

When the costs of acquiring knowledge outweigh the benefits of possessing it, ignorance is rational. In this paper I clarify and explore a related but more neglected phenomenon: cases in which ignorance is motivated by the anticipated costs of possessing knowledge, not acquiring it. The paper has four aims. First, I describe the psychological and social factors underlying this phenomenon of motivated ignorance. Second, I describe those conditions in which it is instrumentally rational. Third, I draw on evidence from the social sciences to argue that this phenomenon of rational motivated ignorance plays an important but often unappreciated role in one of the most socially harmful forms of ignorance today: voter ignorance of societal risks such as climate change. Finally, I consider how to address the high social costs associated with rational motivated ignorance.

Are some physicians afraid of the COVID-19 vaccines? A tale of motivated reasoning

“…Do these many doubts contaminate the perception of the public and cause vaccine hesitancy? That is a known unknown: the publicization of a given issue on media channels does not necessarily amount to persuasion nor behavior change, but it may result in cognitive fatigue, misinformation, and polarization [1][2][3] , which are undesirable as well, given the extent of the crisis.…”

Estimating the causal effects of cognitive effort and policy information on party cue influence

“…But there are plausible reasons to think this may not be voters' primary motivation for forming their policy preferences. Like others (Downs 1957), advocates of this view note that, for most policy issues, the opinions and behavior of any individual voter have negligible effect on the realization of policy outcomes (Kahan 2016;Williams 2019Williams , 2020. Thus, they argue that individual voters have negligible motivation to be sensitive to policy outcomes when forming their policy opinions.…”

Show me the study! Science by press release is not science

“…However, studies on media framing have demonstrated it to not yield strong lasting results in the public as expected due to many other cognition processes related to self-perception, perception of others and expectation to belong to preferred groups and identities [45][46][47][48][49][50][51][52][53][54], as groups, their ideologies and identities, provide their own heuristics for perceiving and interpreting reality [55].…”

“…They organize the story, taking into account organizational and modality constraints, professional judgments and some judgments about the audience [41][42][43][44]. In contrast, people's information processing and their interpretation of facts and reality are also influenced by pre-existing structures, schemes of interpretation that end up interacting and determining how the news will be perceived, accepted, rejected, doubted, which aspects will be cherry-picked and to what extent for the purpose of ego enhancement, affirming identity and ideology, and belonging to groups [41][42][43][44][45][46][47][48][49][50][51][52][53][54][55]. That said, spin on research findings, spin in media coverage and news coverage frames are a recipe for completely losing control over any scientific narrative, laying grounds for misinformation, disinformation and all in-between.…”

“…Maybe it could be a case of the association fallacy by way of the argumentum ad populum: when many people have been doing something, as it appears popular, many others will try and do it as well (regardless of adherence to facts or reason), much like the way the Mathew Effect functions for citations [22,23]. Cognition is, after all, by default, biased [45][46][47][48][49][50][51][52][53][54][55].…”