Why do ostriches stick their heads under the sand when they’re scared?
They don’t. So why do people say they do? A Roman named Pliny the Elder might be partially to blame. He wrote that ostriches “imagine, when they have thrust their head and neck into a bush, that the whole of their body is concealed.”
That would be silly—birds aren’t that dumb. But people will actually pay to avoid learning unpleasant facts. It seems irrational to avoid information that could be useful. But people do it. It’s called information aversion.
Here’s a new experiment on information aversion:
In order to gauge how information aversion affects health care, one group of researchers decided to look at how college students react to being tested for a sexually transmitted disease.
That’s a subject a lot of students worry about, according to Josh Tasoff, an economist at Claremont Graduate University who…
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