Micro-Ignorance and Macro-Ignorance in the Social Sciences Linsey McGoey (bio) the beast of ignorance has been clawing at its cage, demanding more attention. For over 150 years, the social sciences have treated the problem of ignorance production as secondary to the problem of knowledge production. Ignorance has been sneered at like an uninvited guest at a high table, dismissed as an inferior, low-status cousin of knowledge. Recently, a few diners at the table have taken more notice of ignorance. As if sensing an animal sleeping by their feet, they have lifted the tablecloth and gasped. Ignorance has a pulse; ignorance breathes. Ignorance is far more dynamic and more strategic than expected. No wonder people guard their own ignorance: it strikes people as exactly the sort of dangerous animal that should be contained. What happens when ignorance is freed? What happens when scholarly "ignorance of ignorance" is exposed and scholars begin approaching the study of ignorance differently than in the past? And how does ignorance relate to other forms of non-knowledge, including "unknowability"? We are on the brink of discovering some answers. In recent years, the subfield of ignorance studies has become a growing area of scholarship in the social sciences (Proctor and Schiebinger 2008; Sullivan and Tuana 2007; Gross and McGoey 2015). This subfield is underpinned by the insight that different organizations and individuals often have incentives for not wanting to embrace unsettling information, [End Page 197] a reality that helps to showcase the differences and similarities between "unknowability" and "ignorance." Unknowability tends to refer to realities and processes that are not capable of being apprehended in any way—not simply by the "uninitiated" but at all. The phenomenon of "ignorance" is related to but different than unknowability in that "ignorance" of particular facts can be specific to a particular person or institution while those same facts are comprehensible to others. Perhaps because of this—the way "ignorance" implies the failure or the inability to learn rather than the inherent impossibility of knowing something—ignorance tends to carry a pejorative measure that "unknowability" doesn't share. Another difference is that there can be multiple motivations behind ignorance—it can be willful, strategic, or feigned—in a way that differs from the state of unknowability. Although they are distinct phenomena, ignorance and unknowability relate to each other in fruitful ways that require more scholarly attention. In this paper, I focus in particular on a specific type of ignorance, "strategic ignorance," a term that has been defined in different and sometimes antithetical ways by scholars working in different disciplines, from psychology to sociology to economics. Psychologists tend to see strategic ignorance as a type of individual "confirmation bias," where individuals refute evidence that jars with earlier ideological positions. But I argue that the phenomenon doesn't simply involve passive unwillingness to learn. I define "strategic ignorance" in a more active and collective way, as the structural ability to exploit the unknowns in an environment in order to gain more power or resources. This second definition also points to the way that studies of ignorance can help to expand sociological studies of unknowability. Rather than treating "unknowability" as an accidental or inevitable problem of lack of knowledge, strategic ignorance illuminates the way various states and processes of unknowability are often structured by the power of some social groups to remain deliberately ignorant, making some societal "unknowns" a collective achievement rather than either the unplanned absence of [End Page 198] knowledge or secrecy. Secrecy suggests knowledge that is concealed. But strategic ignorance, in contrast, encompasses knowledge that has been thwarted from emerging in the first place. One of the challenges facing the effort to study the social utility of ignorance is the fact that, by definition, both unknowability and ignorance elude observation and quantification. The effort to classify or rank different forms of non-knowing is defeated by the ontological reality of ignorance itself, by the inescapable fact that ignorance is always by definition immeasurable. This reality likely won't stop scholars from trying to quantify levels of ignorance across individuals and nations. But the quantification of ignorance is itself ultimately impossible and unknowable, a reality that underscores the potency...