{"id":63070,"date":"2022-07-16T10:11:35","date_gmt":"2022-07-16T15:11:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=63070"},"modified":"2022-07-16T10:11:35","modified_gmt":"2022-07-16T15:11:35","slug":"why-we-ignore-the-obvious-the-psychology-of-willful-blindness","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=63070","title":{"rendered":"Why We Ignore the Obvious: The Psychology of Willful Blindness"},"content":{"rendered":"

Why We Ignore the Obvious: The Psychology of Willful Blindness<\/a><\/h3>\n

How to counter the gradual narrowing of our horizons.<\/strong><\/p>\n

\n

\"Why<\/a><\/p>\n

\u201cKeep your baby eyes (which are the eyes of genius) on what we don\u2019t know,\u201d<\/em>\u00a0pioneering investigative journalist Lincoln Steffens wrote in a beautiful 1926\u00a0letter of life-advice<\/a>\u00a0to his baby son. And yet the folly of the human condition is precisely that we can\u2019t know what we don\u2019t know \u2014 as E.F. Schumacher elegantly put it in his\u00a0guide for the perplexed<\/a>, \u201ceverything can be seen directly except the eye through which we see.\u201d What obscures those\u00a0transformative unknowns<\/a>\u00a0from view are the\u00a0unconscious biases<\/a>\u00a0that even the best-intentioned of us succumb to.<\/p>\n

In\u00a0Willful Blindness: Why We Ignore the Obvious at Our Peril<\/em><\/strong><\/a>\u00a0(public library<\/em><\/a>), serial entrepreneur and author\u00a0Margaret Heffernan<\/strong>\u00a0examines the intricate, pervasive cognitive and emotional mechanisms by which we\u00a0choose<\/em>, sometimes consciously but mostly not, to remain unseeing in situations where \u201cwe could know, and should know, but don\u2019t know because it makes us feel better not to know.\u201d We do that, Heffernan argues and illustrates through a multitude of case studies ranging from dictatorships to disastrous love affairs to Bernie Madoff, because \u201cthe more tightly we focus, the more we leave out\u201d \u2014 or, as cognitive scientist Alexandra Horowitz put it in her remarkable exploration of\u00a0exactly what we leave out in our daily lives<\/a>, because \u201cattention is an intentional, unapologetic discriminator.\u201d<\/p>\n

The concept of \u201cwillful blindness,\u201d Heffernan explains, comes from the law and originates from legislature passed in the 19th century \u2014 it\u2019s the somewhat counterintuitive idea that you\u2019re responsible \u201cif you could have known, and should have known, something that instead you strove not to see.\u201d …<\/p>\n

\u2026click on the above link to read the rest of the article\u2026<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Why We Ignore the Obvious: The Psychology of Willful Blindness How to counter the gradual narrowing of our horizons. \u201cKeep your baby eyes (which are the eyes of genius) on what we don\u2019t know,\u201d\u00a0pioneering investigative journalist Lincoln Steffens wrote in a beautiful 1926\u00a0letter of life-advice\u00a0to his baby son. And yet the folly of the human […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[1330,33015,658,33016],"class_list":["post-63070","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-liberty","tag-denial","tag-maria-popova","tag-psychology","tag-willful-blindness"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/63070","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=63070"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/63070\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":63071,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/63070\/revisions\/63071"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=63070"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=63070"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=63070"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}