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The tale of the lucky cats surviving shipwrecks

According to a recent study published by the American Psychological Association (APA), “The less people know about important complex issues such as the economy, energy consumption, and the environment, the more they want to avoid becoming well-informed.”

The less people know, the less they want to know, creating what researchers called “the perpetuation of ignorance.”

The study took place in the United States and in Canada during the past two years and involved hundreds of people in five different experiments about how people prefer to handle information about complex social issues.

The decision of not getting information about an issue generates “a chain reaction from ignorance about a subject to dependence on and trust in the government to deal with the issue.”

According to Aaron C. Kay, PhD, co-author of the study and professor at Duke University, due to the complexity of certain issues, people often prefer to “outsource” the problem to the government, so people first trust the government, then became dependents of the government, and finally have faith in the government.

The researchers say that the faith in the government (regardless of political parties) leads people to reject any negative information about an issue, as well as any information that may challenge their faith in the government’s ability to solve that issue.

At the same time, participants in the study accepted for the most part only positive information allowing them to reinforce their beliefs about complex social issues. For the same reason, participants avoided additional information about those issues.

That decision of voluntary ignorance feeds itself and leads people to become even less informed, especially if they perceive the problem to be urgent or imminent.

The study focused on economy, energy consumption, and the environment, but, according to the authors, further research will prove that the same attitude of “voluntary ignorance” can be seen in connection with food safety, national security, health, social inequality, poverty, and moral and ethical conflict.

In other words, people (that is, all of us, including you and me) only want to hear the part of the story they like, especially if it is something benefiting them. Reality does not matter. In my opinion, mass media offers us precisely what we want to hear. That is nothing new. It has happened for many decades.

In 1913, Joseph Pulitzer established the Bureau of Accuracy for his New York World newspaper. The goal was to present stories without mistakes, distortions, or omissions.

However, something interesting happened at that time at the New York World newsroom: all stories about shipwrecks including a cat surviving the accident. (See The Elements of Journalism, by Kovach and Rosenstiel, page 39.)

Decades later, a researcher told the story that there has been a cat surviving a shipwreck in only one occasion, while in other shipwrecks there were no cats involved. Cats were added to “embellish” the stories and to give them a sense of realism.

Perhaps the voluntary ignorance of cats in the stories is not a bad idea after all.

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