Research 40% of people willfully choose to be ignorant. Here’s why

[C C]

https://bigthink.com/neuropsych/people-c...ignorance/

INTRO: Do you have an uncle who believes vaccines cause autism but refuses to study the reams of research showing them to be safe? What about a friend who avoids information about factory animal farming so they can eat cheap meat guilt-free? Or how about that CEO who claims their business is ethically minded, yet doesn’t investigate its supply chain for exploitation of the environment or the impoverished?

Each is an example of what psychologists call willful ignorance — the intentional act of avoiding information that reveals the negative consequences of one’s actions. Not to judge: We all have a place in our lives where we look the other way and pretend everything is fine. It may be personal, political, or professional in nature, but just below the conscious surface, we know our actions don’t align with our stated values.

“Examples [of] willful ignorance abound in everyday life,” Linh Vu, a doctoral candidate at the University of Amsterdam, said. “We wanted to know just how prevalent and how harmful willful ignorance is, as well as why people engage in it.”

To find out, Vu and a team of researchers performed the first meta-analysis on the current empirical evidence of willful ignorance, and it was published in the Psychological Bulletin, a peer-reviewed journal published by the American Psychological Association. They compared the results of 22 studies with a total of more than 6,000 participants. Here’s what they found... (MORE - details)

[Yazata]

I think that this complaint often boils down to the academic elites complaining that many people don't listen to them. 'We are the professors!' they whine, we tell students what to think for a living, so if the public doesn't automatically believe what we tell them to believe and behave as we want them to behave, then that must be 'willful ignorance'!

The problem with that thesis is that the professors, as a class, wear their biases on their sleeves. That's been true ever since the 60's-70's baby-boomers inextricably mixed scholarship and activism. Today the products of the 'student movement' and their students dominate higher education which has just about reached a tipping-point.

Many politically and morally charged issues are very complex and technical. (Epidemiology, vaccine effectiveness, climate change, macroeconomics...) Laypeople are in the position of having to resort to experts, to authority. And not just laypeople, the same thing applies to professors outside their own field of expertise.

So what is a person who isn't a subject matter expert to do when all of the sources of intellectual authority are perceived to be profoundly biased and hence are distrusted? When personal politics and moral intuitions seem to be driving what are ostensibly objective intellectual conclusions, rather than the other way around?

One could argue that deep skepticism about the credibility of purported authority, which those increasingly ignored would-be authorities call 'willful ignorance', seems to be quite rational in those circumstances.

[confused2]

I'm not convinced the studies in the OP actually show what they claim to show which might put me in the willfully ignorant camp.
Regardless..
Most nutty professor stuff doesn't affect me in any way - maybe that's just a UK thing.
A thing that did surprise me was the way (I get the impression) the Covid thing revealed a significant part of the US population weren't familiar with germ theory. I think most people, even in the US, would have been exposed to germ theory at some point so this looks very much like a spectacular example of willful ignorance.