When Is Ignorance Bliss?
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A new paper in Psychological Review by Gerd Gigerenzer and Rocio Garcia-Retamero explores the motives of our willful ignorance. They begin by establishing its prevalence, surveying more than 2000 German and Spanish adults about various forms of future knowledge. Their results are clear proof that most of us want spoiler alerts for real life: between 85 and 90 percent of subjects say they don’t want to know when or why their partner will die. (They feel the same way about their own death.) They also don’t want to know if their marriage will eventually end in divorce. This preference for ignorance even applies to positive events: between 40 and 70 percent of subjects don’t want to know about their future Christmas gifts, or who won the big soccer match, or the gender of their next child.
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