Concept
Willful Ignorance
ethics consumer-behavior motivated-reasoning
Consumers have a measurable tendency to avoid seeking out information about whether a product was made ethically, precisely because finding out something bad would force them to either stop buying a product they like or feel bad about continuing to buy it — remaining ignorant protects the good feeling of the purchase. Daniel (Danny) Zane credits Julie Irwin with the founding demonstration of this pattern in marketing research, and built his own research program extending it from a passive avoidance strategy into an active memory strategy.
The information does get used once it can't be avoided. Irwin's original finding was that when ethical information is forced in front of a consumer at the point of purchase — a sign at a fast-food counter noting the environmental cost of a burger, for instance — people do factor it into the decision, sometimes switching their choice. Ignorance about a product's ethics is willful only while it's genuinely avoidable.
Zane's extension: consumers don't just avoid ethical information, they selectively forget it. Across several experiments — reviewing descriptions of six products varying on ethical attributes (child labor vs. fair labor, sustainable vs. rainforest wood) and being tested later on recall and recognition — participants were consistently worse at remembering negative ethical information than equivalently salient positive ethical information, and frequently misremembered a negative attribute as positive rather than simply forgetting it (see Zane Unethical-Amnesia Memory Studies). Tellingly, a follow-up study found that people rate someone who forgets unethical information (without realizing it) as less morally wrong than someone who remembers it but chooses to ignore it anyway — meaning the brain has a genuine incentive to forget rather than consciously suppress.
Willful ignorance carries a social cost too, once it can't be maintained. People who acted willfully ignorant of a product's ethics, on learning that another consumer sought out and used that same ethical information, rated that more-informed "ethical other" as less intelligent and less attractive — a denigration response, rather than admiration or inspiration — which in turn reduced the willfully-ignorant person's own concern for the underlying ethical issue (see Zane Ethical-Other Denigration Study).
Practical fix: don't rely on memory. Since consumers forget or misremember unethical information more than ethical information, and denigrate rather than emulate those who don't, Zane's recommended solution for an ethically-differentiated brand is to put the ethical claim in front of the customer repeatedly and unavoidably — on the website, on packaging, in-store — rather than trusting it to be remembered from a single disclosure. A December 2022 analysis of over 10 million grocery-store transactions found products carrying a sustainability message earned 6.4% higher revenue than otherwise-identical products without one (see Troy Duhan Das Sustainability-Messaging Revenue Study).
Two real-world cases bookend the research: outdoor brand Canada Goose saw no revenue decline through a decade of protests over its use of coyote-fur trapping, and continued growing after eventually removing the fur (see Canada Goose Coyote-Fur Ethics Case); reports of child labor in cobalt mining for Apple, Samsung, and other tech suppliers, and of extreme working conditions and suicides at Apple's Foxconn manufacturing partner, likewise produced no measurable drop in iPhone sales (see Apple Foxconn Cobalt Child-Labor Case).
Discussed in
- Episode 170 — 170-do-you-have-unethical-amnesia