The paper describes deliberate ignorance as a universal human tendency, not a partisan one. Reducing it to a conservative specific problem is ironically a good demonstration of the phenomenon.
The framing of the whole paper makes the point implicitly. They open with Aristotle’s claim that all humans by nature desire to know, then argue the converse that choosing not to know is equally a part of human nature.
The examples they use span medical patients, Nobel laureates, lawyers, investors, and ordinary citizens across multiple countries. The paper treats it as a species level cognitive phenomenon.
This is accurate. For a scenario with a possibility of litigation you must ultimately geocode the address with google maps API or census geocoder, point in polygon against district boundaries (geopandas or shapely), then pass the result through a rules table keyed on jurisdiction + case type.
Follow up paper that extends the concept of identity protective cognition explaining that people avoid, neglect, and distort information to protect identity based belief systems.
The Good, Bad and Ugly of information (un)processing; Homo Economicus, Homo Heuristicus and Homo Ignorans
It's hard for me to reconcile with the NYT after their role in 2002-2003 of building public consensus for the Iraq war with front page stories that turned out to less than credible.
Right now, my main news sources are an amalgam of Reuters, BBC World Service, Al Jazeera English, Financial Times, NHK World / Channel News Asia.
No source is perfect and think it is a wise approach to even look at obviously biased sources with the understanding of what they are and see where the propaganda diverges and what the message is they want you to take from it.
Reading any one of these alone still gives you a skewed picture. The value is in the combination with an understanding of the motivations behind the voice you are hearing.
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