Professor Sunstein explains why people may avoid information that is painful, threatening or seemingly useless. Reading his article after 25 years in development and humanitarian work, I find deliberate ignorance highly resonant when applied to institutions, which can filter uncomfortable community knowledge, but less so to the people they serve. The framework is strongest for actors with agency, who can choose whether to know and act. It is weaker, and potentially unfair, for people living with poverty, violence, displacement or exclusion, where constrained agency, social norms, manufactured ignorance and the absence of credible pathways to action often matter more.

Deliberate Ignorance is Institutional Too

Sunstein shows that people may avoid information because it is frightening, shame-inducing or unactionable. The same dynamic appears at system level. Development and humanitarian agencies may disregard community feedback, social data, exclusion patterns or early warnings because knowing would require adapting strategies, redistributing power, investing in long-term processes or facing accountability. Information creates obligation: if we know communities experience aid as unfair, we are no longer innocent bystanders. Agencies may not want to hear that services are inaccessible, cash assistance is captured, girls are unsafe, or Indigenous communities were not meaningfully consulted. Despite standards such as the Core Humanitarian Standard, systems can make ignorance easy through tokenistic participation, feedback without analysis, reporting not led by communities, uninformative dashboards, unrepresentative spokespeople and simplified stories. Deliberate ignorance becomes dangerous when institutionalized.

Looking Away from Critical Information During Emergencies

In 2024–2025, while overseeing UNICEF’s community engagement response to Mpox in Central and Eastern Africa, I saw this dynamic in practice. We generated an unprecedented flow of behavioral, social and community insights, yet programmes changed little. Interventions remained standard despite evidence for more contextualized, equity-focused and community-led approaches. The issue was institutional inertia: centralized planning, biomedical hierarchies, overstretched teams, rigid funding and familiar interventions easier to repeat than rethink. Systems can collect evidence while remaining unable (or unwilling) to let it disrupt decisions.

In emergencies, affected people may avoid official information not from a preference for ignorance, but because it is contradictory, frightening, politicized, excessive or detached from lived experience. Rumors often signal distrust, grief, coercive histories or unresolved practical barriers.

From Deliberate Ignorance to Deliberate Listening

UNICEF’s community engagement standards start from a simple premise: communities should be listened to and have a meaningful role in issues affecting them. Where deliberate ignorance closes the window, community engagement keeps it open - but only if participation changes decisions. Deliberate listening brings complex inputs into decision-making through participatory design and monitoring, qualitative inquiry, feedback, frontline insights and consultation with marginalized groups. Participation and feedback are therefore core governance disciplines, not soft add-ons. Without influence and programme adaptation, however, they may provide window dressing while preserving ignorance. The solution is not more information, but systems that make community knowledge safe to share, hard to ignore and consequential.

Deliberate Ignorance, Privilege and Equity

Sunstein’s three values of information (instrumental, hedonic and cognitive) fit many middle-class consumers in rich countries, including his climate and animal welfare examples. But for people living in displacement, extreme poverty, violence or exclusion, the more basic issue is often not avoidance but lack of agency, because of cognitive depletion, danger, mistrust, despair or no viable pathway to act.

This is not marginal: about 2 billion people live in conflict-affected areas (UN), almost 700 million in extreme poverty (World Bank), 117.3 million are forcibly displaced (UNHCR), and about 840 million women have experienced partner or sexual violence (WHO). For them, for those experiencing dire daily realities in Gaza, Sudan or Afghanistan, and for young people facing mental distress or Indigenous communities facing existential threats, processing information can be difficult and acting on it impossible.
Information becomes ethical only when connected to agency. A mother who learns that her child has severe acute malnutrition needs an available service; adolescents who fear abuse on the way to school need someone to act. To tell people what is wrong without expanding what they can do creates burden without a credible path to action. The practical lesson from social and behavior change is that the opposite of ignorance is not awareness, but actionable agency: usable, trusted knowledge met with structural and socially supported solutions.

From Deliberate to Pluralistic Ignorance

Sunstein links deliberate ignorance to motivated reasoning and the idea that people may hold beliefs because they are emotionally useful. But many beliefs relevant to development work are not simply individual preferences: they are socially organized expectations. People may privately doubt a practice while publicly complying with what they believe others expect. In such cases, the problem is not deliberate ignorance but pluralistic ignorance, social sanctions and constrained choice. FGM, child marriage, violence against children and gender-based violence are sustained not only by beliefs, but reproduced by social expectations, and rooted in gender inequality, poverty and structural issues.

Many beliefs are also not empirical claims waiting to be corrected by better information. They are embedded in faith, identity, belonging and moral order. With most of the world’s population identifying with a religion (Pew: 75% in 2020), a global psychology of information must take seriously that many people reason through religious, moral and communal frames, not only through individual evidence processing; fact-based discourses might have little influence on decision making systems.

Deliberately Manufactured Ignorance

Finally, ignorance is often produced. It is not only chosen by the uninformed; it is maintained by actors with agendas. When powerful interests fund denial, delay or misleading reassurance, ignorance becomes political economy. Climate is the obvious example: fossil fuel interests (extraction industry, banking sector) have heavily used reframing, sponsored research, marketing and greenwashing to blur accountability and delay action. Recent research also describes climate “new denial,” where actors no longer simply deny climate change but undermine mitigation and adaptation solutions. Ignorance is maintained deliberately, for profits. Ignorance is a policy and power issue, not a communication one.

Overall, deliberate ignorance is a useful lens when applied up the power gradient (to stakeholders with agency). It becomes more problematic when applied down the power gradient to people living with scarcity, danger, exclusion or limited choice. For many people we serve, behavior change is less an individual cognitive issue than a structural and social one. The challenge is to build humane systems where knowing becomes possible, useful and consequential.