Humans are infovores, hungry to discover, and nothing holds more fascination than the future. Once we looked for answers through divination, now science can forecast significant events such as the onset of certain hereditary disease. But the fact that some people choose not to know – even when information is accessible, and has a bearing on their lives – has encouraged scientists, including Gerd Gigerenzer and Rocio Garcia-Retamero, to try to map out the limits of our appetite for knowledge. Their recent study in Psychological Review suggests that it is a fear of what we might discover – and wishing that we’d never known – that often drives us to deliberate ignorance.

Gigerenzer, Director of the Max Planck Institute for Human Development, and Garcia-Retamero at the University of Granada, asked nationally representative samples of participants in Germany and Spain whether they would be willing to know the date or cause of their own or their partner’s death; whether their marriage would end in divorce; as well as information relating to positive future events like knowing the gender of their unborn child, or what was in store for them under the Christmas wrapping paper.

Whereas previous research with people at heightened risk of specific diseases found rates of deliberate ignorance of between 10 and 30 per cent, the rates here were far higher. Close to 90 per cent of participants said they’d prefer not to know about future negative events (this tended to generalise: a person who didn’t want to know about one negative outcome usually said they didn’t want to know about any others). Rates of deliberate ignorance were also high for positive events, but more variable – only a third of participants said they did not want to know their child’s gender, for instance, compared with three quarters preferring not to know the outcome of a football match they were watching. So wilful ignorance is commonplace, but what’s driving it? To read more from Alex Fradera, click here.