Don’t Want to Know

Welcome back. Did you happen to see my blog post of a few weeks ago, Political Fact Checking? I summarized a study of how partisanship and prior beliefs influence the way people process political misinformation, specifically Donald Trump’s false statements during the presidential primaries. The results suggested that politicians can spread misinformation without losing supporters.

Avoiding information. (Modified
from photo on multiple websites)

I ask if you saw the post, because there’s a recent study I thought provided further insight on the topic. Investigators from Carnegie Mellon University examined how and why people purposely avoid information as well as some of the consequences. 

Their assessment, which was based on review of research published in economics, psychology and other fields, focused on active avoidance--when the individual is aware the information is available and either has avoided or would avoid free access to it.

Information Avoidance Methods
The investigators categorized the principal tactics used to avoid information, presented here with examples.

   Physical Avoidance -- avoiding certain newspapers, TV or radio shows or conversations with specific people; not returning for results of medical tests (e.g., HIV AIDS).
   Inattention -- seeing a headline and deciding not to read the article, or reading the article and choosing not to think about it.
   Biased Interpretation -- weighing and interpreting information in a manner that supports what they believe and denigrating evidence that contradicts their beliefs.
   Forgetting -- deliberately and selectively failing to review negative information and, in time, forgetting it. (Notably, forgetting may help people deal with bad experiences.)
   Self-Handicapping -- choosing tasks that are too easy or too difficult or taking actions that undermine their performance to avoid information about their own abilities.

Information Avoidance Consequences
I doubt you would have any difficulty coming up with a list of consequences of avoiding information. The effect on decision making topped the investigators’ and probably anyone’s list, whether it’s not reading calories on a label or potentially useful feedback.

Media bias is another significant consequence. Media outlets have incentive to provide biased coverage that aligns with the perspective of their target audience. Nowadays it’s easy to load up on information while avoiding perspectives that challenge one’s existing views.

Among other consequences the investigators discuss are groupthink, when people adopt the shared belief rather than collect their own information; spread of disease could occur if people avoid being tested out of fear they have a contagious disease, or the related ethical transgression if one avoids being tested so as to not confront the dilemma of sharing bad new the test might reveal; and climate change denial, where rejection of a near-unanimous scientific consensus almost by definition requires information avoidance.

Wrap Up
People avoid information that threatens their happiness and wellbeing, which are intertwined with their beliefs. “Not knowing” proffers plausible deniability; knowing might make them feel bad.

Thinking about the earlier blog post on political fact-checking, I would expect those who did not support Trump during the primary would have fact-checked much of what he said because the results often made them happy.

In contrast, I would expect Trump supporters to have avoided fact-checking, certainly, because they trusted their candidate, but also because discovering he was wrong would have made them feel bad. Of course, there had to be those who just didn’t care.

Thanks for stopping by.

P.S.
Carnegie Mellon study in Journal of Economic Literature:
www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/jel.20151245
Article on study on ScienceDaily website: www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/03/170310121732.htm

Too Much Information Addendum

With last Friday’s blog post, Age Learning Decline, in mind, I remembered the plea of a government office director for better analysis tools. There was just too much information to handle effectively. And that was in the early 1990s. Here are several photos and graphics that I think express his thoughts.

Before the Information Age, we were buried in paperwork. (Multiple websites)

Saved by computers, we soon faced the tidal wave of digital data. (Multiple websites)

Is there ever just enough information? (Multiple websites)

Are there too many signs? (Multiple websites)

Have we overloaded our staff? (Multiple websites)

No doubt, this is how staff members feel when overwhelmed by the glut of data. (Sign from www.retroplanet.com/PROD/27684)

Age Learning Decline

When I was in academia, someone hung one of Gary Larson’s The Far Side cartoons on my bulletin board. It showed a classroom of students and the instructor, with one student, hand-raised, asking, “Mr. Osborne, may I be excused? My brain is full.” That’s sort of what today’s blog post is about.

Welcome back. Can you endure the findings of another study of brain decline with age? If you’re old or think you might get that way, it’s worth your time. And I’ll keep it short.

In last Friday’s blog post (Brain Focusing with Sound), I went on about how distractions become more difficult to suppress as we age, though my focus was a training strategy that might help.

Well, there’s a recent report on how visual learning is affected by aging. It’s not all bad news. On the bright side, older folks learn as well as younger adults. The problem is we learn too much.

Visual Learning Study

Investigators from Brown University, University of California, Riverside and Taiwan’s National Yang Ming University compared older against younger adults on visual perception learning--how performance on a visual task improves given experience with or training on the task.

Sequence of letters and numbers with moving
background dots from visual perception learning
study. (Graphic by Brown University, from
www.eurekalert.org/multimedia/pub/82852.php)

For nine days, 20 participants (10, age 67 to 79, and 10, age 19 to 30) viewed a quick sequence of four letters and two numbers shown in mixed order. The participants were instructed to report only the numbers they saw, yet each letter and number was shown against a background of dots, which moved with varying levels of directional uniformity.

Testing before and after the 9-day training found that the older participants improved as much as the younger participants in their ability to identify the two numbers. But asked about the dots when they saw the numbers, the older participants had also learned to discern the prevailing direction of dot movement. For the younger participants, the direction was too weakly expressed to learn or clear enough to recognize and suppress.

A separate test of processing speed and divided and selective attention confirmed that, unlike the younger participants, the older participants, in essence, just couldn’t help learning the irrelevant dot movement in addition to the relevant numbers.

Wrap Up

The investigators point out that our learning system needs to have (1) plasticity--the capability to learn new items and (2) stability--the capability to retain important items or prevent unimportant items from being learned. The study found there was no reduction in the plasticity of the visual system of older adults; however, there was a loss in stability.

Presuming our brain capacity is limited, the learning decline with age appears to be due to our inability to suppress irrelevant information--we take in too much--rather than to our ability to learn. Which is to say that we keep learning, but our filters get clogged. Our brains get full, Mr. Osborne.

Thought-provoking, no? Thanks for stopping by.

P.S.

Visual perception learning study in Current Biology journal:
www.cell.com/current-biology/abstract/S0960-9822%2814%2901350-5

Articles on the study on Science Daily and Los Angeles Times websites:
www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/11/141126124338.htm
www.latimes.com/science/sciencenow/la-sci-sn-old-people-learn-trivia-20141126-story.htm