Most people would not want to know their future if given the choice even if their future could make them happy, a new study by Germany’s Max Planck Institute has found according to a report in Daily Mail.
Researchers say that people would rather avoid the suffering that knowing the future could cause.
Most people wish to avoid regretting their decision to know, and want to preserve the enjoyment of suspense in their lives, the research found.
The team also found that those who prefer not to know the future are more risk averse and are more likely to buy life and legal insurance than people who want to know the future.
They claim that those who choose to be ignorant anticipate regret and so are more pessimistic.
The length of time until an event would occur played a role in participants’ responses.
Deliberate ignorance was more likely the nearer the event was.
For example, older adults were less likely than younger adults to want to know when they or their partner would die, and the cause of death.
“In our study, we’ve found that people would rather decline the powers that made Cassandra famous, in an effort to forgo the suffering that knowing the future may cause, avoid regret and also maintain the enjoyment of suspense that pleasurable events provide,” Dr Gerd Gigerenzer said.
Two studies involving more than 2,000 adults in Germany and Spain found that 85 to 90% of people would not want to know about upcoming negative events.
Forty to 70% preferred to remain ignorant of upcoming positive events.
Only 1% of participants consistently wanted to know what the future held.
Participants were asked about a range of both positive and negative potential events.
For example, they were asked if they wanted to know who won a football game they had planned to watch later, what they were getting for Christmas, whether there is life after death and if their marriage would eventually end in divorce.
Finding out the sex of their unborn child was the only item in the survey where more people wanted to know than didn’t.
Only 37% of participants said they would not want to know.
