Deliberate ignorance in moral dilemmas: Protecting judgment from conflicting information

Abstract

People often protect themselves from information that might make their judgments and decisions look questionable; information that they could easily access, but that they choose not to see. This is a deliberate form of ignorance. In two studies, we investigated deliberate ignorance in moral judgment. Participants made judgments about trolley-type sacrificial dilemmas, pertaining to whether it is acceptable to sacrifice one person in order to save more. They were then asked whether they would like to receive additional information about the dilemma, which had the potential to make their previous judgment less defensible (e.g., information about the identity of the sacrificed person, or about the number of people who could benefit from the sacrifice). Finally, regardless of their preference to receive the information or ignore it, they were shown the additional information, and they were again asked to make a judgment. As predicted, some participants chose not to see the missing information. Critically, though, those who chose to ignore the information were just as likely to (significantly) revise their judgments when they saw the new information as those who indicated that they wanted to receive the information. Thus, these participants were deliberately ignorant of information that proved to be consequential.