Do you want to know what you’ll get for Christmas? A movie spoiler? When you’ll die? The study of deliberate ignorance reveals the topics people want to remain in the dark about.
During the Cold War in eastern Germany, the Stasi secret police monitored citizens in the German Democratic Republic with the help of tens of thousands of “informal collaborators.”
These were everyday people who informed on their neighbors, friends, and family members. By 1989, there were 189,000 of them, about one for every 90 people in the GDR. One informant, while watering her friend’s plants, found a western German pudding brand by snooping through the cupboard and told the Stasi, as reported by Der Spiegel. This caused her friend to be fired from his army job, “and an East German household was plunged into destitution.”
Those who left their files untouched practiced “deliberate ignorance,” according to Ralph Hertwig, a psychologist at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development who studied the decisions people made about their Stasi files, and is the co-editor of the 2021 book Deliberate Ignorance: Choosing Not to Know.
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