Emotional, cognitive and social-psychological mechanisms underlying deliberate ignorance about climate change

Abstract

Climate change is among the most pressing challenges humanity is currently facing. Despite the large majority of people globally acknowledging this as a fact, many neglect or actively seek to avoid information about it. The present contribution reviews the psychological motivations that may underlie the choice to remain uninformed, delves into associated emotional, cognitive, and social-psychological mechanisms, and offers systematic methodological solutions applicable to scholarly research on deliberate ignorance in the environmental domain. The paper thus lays the foundations for a comprehensive understanding and systematisation of the diverse functions that deliberate ignorance may have in the context of climate change and proposes a research agenda to empirically test its presence, frequency, and long-term consequences.