Evidence for multiple motivational accounts of willful ignorance in prosocial decision making beyond moral wiggling

Abstract

Abstract People are generally expected to seek information, especially when it informs their decisions. As such, the phenomenon of willful ignorance—avoiding behaviorally relevant information—remains puzzling. This research explores plausible motivations behind willful ignorance in prosocial decision making, a behavior with negative societal implications. While it is traditionally attributed to selfish motives (moral wiggling), alternative explanations like tradeoff aversion and inattention have received little attention. In a within-subject design ( N  = 878), we examined behavioral patterns across decision contexts designed to render specific kinds of motivations more or less plausible. Specifically, we compare decision shifts when the option to ignore is given vs not given across contexts that systematically vary the plausible motivational relevance of ignorance. Our results suggest that approximately one fifth of ignorance cases are consistent with moral wiggling, another fifth with tradeoff aversion, and roughly one third with inattention. In addition, about one sixth of ignorance cases occurred in situations in which the information was not instrumental to participants’ decisions. These findings challenge the traditional view that ignorance is mainly selfishly motivated, underscoring the complexity of human behavior. By highlighting the possibility of multiple motivational accounts of willful ignorance, this study calls for a nuanced approach to mitigating its societal consequences.