The Psychology of Ignorance
May 2026 · Oxford University Press
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240
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About this ebook
Historically, the psychology of ignorance has been under-explored, despite being a topic of great importance to anyone wishing to understand human behaviour. In this volume, Smithson develops foundations for a psychology of ignorance by providing an extensive and critical account of what psychology has to say about ignorance. The book's scope includes the nature and causes of ignorance, when and why we attribute ignorance to ourselves or to others, how we feel, think, and behave when we are aware of our ignorance, when and why we choose to be ignorant, and how and why we impose ignorance on one another. Its primary goals are making psychology's implicit treatments of ignorance explicit, identifying missing connections within psychology on this topic as well as connections with other disciplines, and rebalancing psychology's largely negative orientation towards ignorance. As well as focusing on the nature of ignorance and its neglect as a research topic by psychology, the book examines varieties of dysfunctional ignorance and their relations with psychological disorders, investigates decision making under various kinds of ignorance and uncertainty, and explores how and why we create and impose ignorance on each other through indirection, secrecy, lies, and censoring.
Historically, the psychology of ignorance has been under-explored, despite being a topic of great importance to anyone wishing to understand human behaviour. In this volume, Smithson develops foundations for a psychology of ignorance by providing an extensive and critical account of what psycholo...
About the author
Michael Smithson is a Professor Emeritus in the School of Medicine and Psychology at The Australian National University. He has contributed to research and theory on judgment and decision-making under uncertainty and ignorance and was one of the first to write about ignorance as a social construct. He also has developed novel statistical techniques, including new families of probability distributions, and pioneered applications of fuzzy set theory to the human sciences. His publications include seven books, two edited collections, and more than 200 refereed journal articles and book chapters.
Michael Smithson is a Professor Emeritus in the School of Medicine and Psychology at The Australian National University. He has contributed to research and theory on judgment and decision-making under uncertainty and ignorance and was one of the first to write about ignorance as a social construc...
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