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Good intentions gone bad — when information harms
The choice between knowledge (or disclosure) and ignorance (or secrecy) is not always a simple matter of personal preference
If they’re being really honest, even know-it-alls will agree that they don’t know everything. And while we can probably list quite a few things we don’t know that we would like to know, there are also things that we had rather not know — whether we have a genetic predisposition for an incurable disease, perhaps, or what our colleagues really think about us. When we prefer ignorance, it is likely because we assume all such knowledge would do is make us unhappy. On the other hand, bad decisions can often be traced to lack of knowledge, so it should stand to reason that more accurate information would be beneficial. Our health might be a domain where this is particularly true. Yet recent research found that, of people who tested positive for HIV (at a time when treatment was not yet available), those who had learned their test results were 23 percentage points less likely to survive than those who had not. Isn’t that odd?
Well-intentioned information causing death
Alberto Ciancio of Glasgow University’s Adam Smith Business School and colleagues analysed longitudinal data from an…
