In recent study, researchers pinpoint the age we start avoiding information—even when it’s helpful.
In a world of information overload, it can feel soothing to stick your head in the sand.
Don’t want to hear what the doctor might say? It’s easy not to make a follow-up appointment. Did a favorite political candidate say something you disagreed with? The evidence can disappear with a flick of a finger.
According to psychologists, avoiding information when it’s uncomfortable is a common adult behavior, often referred to as the “Ostrich Effect.”
But how do we become an ostrich? Children are notorious for seeking out information, often in the form of endless questions. So when do we sprout feathers and decide that, actually, the number of calories in a slice of cake is none of our business?
This behavioral origin point was exactly what researchers at the University of Chicago hoped to pin down.
In a study in Psychological Science, the research team led by postdoctoral scholar Radhika Santhanagopalan discovered that as children aged, the tendency to avoid information grew stronger.
Though 5- and 6-year-olds still actively sought information, 7- to 10-year-olds were much more likely to strategically avoid learning something if it elicited a negative emotion.
“To understand the origins of decision-making behaviors—and how they change over time—the only population that can give you insight is children,” Santhanagopalan says.
As a doctoral student in both business and psychology, Santhanagopalan sat at the intersection of an interesting paradox. In her business classes, she learned how adults—whether ignoring a tanking stock market or refusing to look at a test result—often actively avoid information, even when it shoots them in the foot.
However, in her developmental psychology classes, the exact opposite was true for children.
“Why is it that children are these super curious people, but then we somehow end up as these information avoiders as adults?” she wondered. “What is this transition?”
To answer this question, Santhanagopalan partnered with professors Jane Risen at University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business and Katherine Kinzler in the psychology department.
In their initial experiment, the researchers looked at five reasons why we might willfully choose to remain ignorant:
- To avoid negative emotions like anxiety or disappointment
- To avoid negative information about our own likability or competence
- To avoid challenges to our beliefs
- To protect our preferences
- To act in our own self-interest (perhaps while trying to appear not self-interested)
They then adapted these into five scenarios for children to see if they could elicit information avoidance. For example, each child was asked to imagine their favorite and least favorite candy. They were then asked if they wanted to watch a video about why eating that candy was bad for their teeth.
“We found that, whereas younger children really wanted to seek information, older children started to exhibit these avoidance tendencies,” Santhanagopalan says.
“For example, they didn’t want to know why their favorite candy was bad for them, but they were totally fine learning why their least favorite candy is bad for them.”
This finding held for all motivations except for competency. Children of all ages were not afraid to learn if they’d done badly on a test, for example. Santhanagopalan hypothesizes that this could be due to the growth mindset encouraged in school.
“It’s possible that because they’re getting all this messaging about how you can change your aptitude if you put in the work,” she says, “maybe they’re more inclined to seek information because they know they can potentially change the outcome.”
The research team was also curious about when children begin exploiting moral “wiggle room,” or the idea that people tend to weaponize ambiguity for their own gain.
“We want to act in our own self-interest, but we also care a lot about appearing fair to other people,” Santhanagopalan says. “Moral wiggle room allows us to achieve both goals.”
In one experiment, children were presented with two buckets, each of which contained stickers for themselves and their partner. They could see that Bucket A offered them more stickers than Bucket B, but the number of stickers their partner would receive from each bucket was hidden. Before making their choice of bucket, participants were asked whether they wanted to know how many stickers their partner would get.
Though it didn’t cost them anything to learn the information, the researchers found that older children increasingly avoided knowing how many stickers their partner would get, allowing them to make their choice guilt-free.
“What the moral wiggle room does is allow them to pick the self-interested payoff, while also maintaining the illusion of fairness,” Santhanagopalan says. “That veil of ignorance allows them to act in their own self-interest.”
There are some good reasons to avoid negative information, Santhanagopalan admits. Information can overwhelm, threaten, and paralyze. However, too much avoidance can also have severe negative consequences, like deepening political polarization or ideological rigidity.
To avoid avoidance, she suggests thinking through why you might be avoiding something—possibly prioritizing short-term comfort over long-term benefits. Santhanagopalan posits that it could help to reframe uncomfortable information as useful and valuable.
Research suggests that intervening while children are still young could keep them from falling into avoidance traps and have compounding benefits.
So could grappling with dreaded uncertainty.
“Humans have this propensity to want to resolve uncertainty, but when the resolution is threatening, people might flip to avoidance instead. I think there’s something to be says about being able to tolerate and even embrace some level of uncertainty,” Santhanagopalan says. “I think that might help in not falling prey to information avoidance.”
If all else fails, she advises, mimic what children do best: Follow your curiosity.
Source: University of Chicago
