The power of not knowing
While knowledge is important, a position of not-knowing about the threats we face sparks curiosity and the motivation to navigate uncertainty together.
Chemical pollution is, as one researcher recent suggested, “a threat to the thriving of humans and nature of a similar order as climate change” but is decades behind global heating in terms of public knowledge. They went on to say “a lot of people assume that there’s really great knowledge and huge due diligence on the chemical safety of these things. But it really isn’t the case.”
What we know and don’t know sits at the centre of some of today’s most charged debates. At the centre of this is, of course, the huge debate around misinformation but perhaps also a deeper anxiety about knowledge itself - who gets to decide what counts as true, and how that truth should be verified. Media literacy, critical thinking and trust are battlegrounds for what is, in essence, ‘warfare’ of knowing.
And if ‘knowing’ is central to how we manage societally and individually, then what are the implications for policy makers and marketers who hope to influence change in behaviour? At a very simple level, knowing something is a precursor to taking action. But, as we shall see, there is also a great deal of evidence that simply giving people information is important but far from sufficient.
Our pathway through this is in fact to make the case that adopting a, perhaps counter intuitive, position that ‘not-knowing’ is in fact much more important than is often considered. And whilst there is much researched and theorised about knowledge and knowing, much less is explored and written about being in a state of ‘not-knowing’ which arguably is a much more familiar human condition.
We make the case that being willing to accept states of not-knowing is not only inevitable but something to welcome and support if we are to take steps to meet the complex societal and planetary challenges we now face, such as chemical pollution.
The case for knowing
But before exploring the power of not-knowing, it’s worth acknowledging why knowing, or at least the perception of knowing, matters in behavioural science.
One of the clearest cases is made through what is known as the Competence Hypothesis. This body of research suggests that people are more likely to take action when they feel knowledgeable in a particular domain, even if that knowledge is superficial or incomplete. In other words, we don’t just act when we are competent; we act when we feel competent – a small but significant distinction.
A well-known example comes from a study by Chip Heath and Amos Tversky comparing how likely people are to place a bet on a sports match versus a random lottery. Despite the statistical odds being similar, participants were far more comfortable betting on sports. This was due to how they knew the teams, or at least felt they did, as they had watched the games, recognised the players, heard the commentary. This domain familiarity gave them perceived competence, which in turn reduced perceived risk and increased their willingness to act.
Hence, this is not simply about statistical reasoning but about affective trust in one’s own judgement. Knowledge, or the appearance of it, increases confidence, and confidence in what we know is, it seems, a powerful predictor of behaviour.
This is echoed in other behavioural domains. For example, people are more likely to invest in companies they have heard of, regardless of whether that knowledge is meaningful. And this is why brand familiarity has long been recognised as such a potent factor in decision-making. In this the act of knowing doesn’t just inform the decision; it legitimises it, giving people a sense of control, even if the control is ultimately illusory.
In behaviour change interventions, this matters. When people feel equipped - such as understanding the wording, seeing examples they relate to, and having prior exposure to similar scenarios - they are more likely to engage. Whether it’s quitting smoking, changing diets, or switching to renewable energy, a sense of competence makes the leap feel safer.
So while we are making an argument for the power of not-knowing, we start with this acknowledgement: in many situations, perceived knowledge increases behavioural willingness. It makes action feel less like a gamble and more like an informed choice.
How knowing does not always work
While improved awareness, knowledge, and skills are often considered essential foundations for good decision-making, they are far from sufficient. Simply giving people information does not guarantee that they will act on it.
A major meta-analysis on finance behaviour by Daniel Fernandes, John Lynch, and Richard Netemeyer examined financial education programmes and found that they explained only 0.1% of the variance in financial behaviours, a vanishingly small effect. So, despite the widespread belief that better literacy should lead to better decisions, in financial behaviours at least, the data suggests otherwise. Knowledge alone doesn’t translate into action.
Part of the issue here is that behavioural interventions can tend to assume people act as purely economic actors, so that with enough awareness and skill, we will make good choices. But daily life rarely plays out that way - people are busy, distracted and overwhelmed. Finding the best deal in a complex, rarely visited financial market takes time and mental effort, which is often in short supply when you’re managing families, work, bills, or just trying to get through the day.
And even when knowledge is delivered, it does not always stick. The paper’s authors show that the effects of financial education tend to decay over time, quickly forgotten unless anchored to a real, immediate decision. That’s why they advocate for “just-in-time” education: targeted interventions delivered at the exact moment a decision is being made. Timing, not just content, matters.
Other promising approaches shift the focus from abstract knowledge to practical relevance. Economists Drexler, Alejandro, Greg Fischer, and Antoinette Schoar tested this in the Dominican Republic, working with small businesses. Rather than offering textbook financial training, her team distilled simple, context-relevant ‘rules of thumb’ drawn from the habits of successful local enterprises. These heuristics were short, concrete, and directly tied to everyday business needs: those who received this rule-of-thumb training saw sales increase by up to 25%, while those who received standard financial literacy training saw little change.
This supports a broader point: people don’t just need to know more, they need to feel that what they know fits into the rhythm of their lives. knowledge that is not readily understandable, relatable, or actionable can quickly fade.
But this limits-of-knowing problem isn’t just about attention or relevance, it’s also about appetite. Even when the knowledge is delivered in the right way, it can demand more than people are ready to give, whether emotionally, socially, or practically. Which brings us to what has been called the Cassandra problem: when knowing too much doesn’t spur action but instead shuts it down.
Knowing too much: The Cassandra problem
In Greek mythology, Cassandra was cursed with the gift of true prophecy, but no one believed her. Today, the ‘Cassandra effect’ has become a kind of modern parable: not just about being ignored, but about the emotional toll of seeing what’s coming and being powerless to stop it. It’s the lonely cost of knowing too much.
Psychologists Ralph Hertwig and Christoph Engel offer a counterpoint through their work on deliberate ignorance. They argue that people often choose not to know certain things, not because they’re irrational, but because knowing can harm. If learning a future truth is likely to generate regret, anxiety, or despair then not knowing becomes a legitimate, protective choice, a form of emotional risk management.
This is illustrated in the film The Farewell (2019), directed by Lulu Wang. Based on a true story, the film follows a Chinese-American woman who returns to China to visit her grandmother, Nai Nai, who has been diagnosed with terminal cancer. But Nai Nai doesn’t know, her family has chosen not to tell her, instead gathering under the guise of a wedding to say goodbye. The decision reflects a practice common across East and South Asia: shielding loved ones from harsh truths not to deceive, but to protect. For Nai Nai, not knowing becomes a kind of mercy, allowing her to continue living with dignity and joy, unburdened by fear.
While knowledge is often considered to equal empowerment and not-knowing is framed as apathy or ignorance, but this research suggests it can also function as emotional self-preservation. And it seems this practice is widespread. A Reuters Institute study across 17 countries found that 39% of people now actively avoid the news, up 10% in less than a decade. For many, this is arguably not about disinterest but protection against emotional fatigue, especially visible around environmental concerns. For example, 69% of Gen Z feel anxious after encountering climate content online, far higher than older generations.
This suggests that people may reject information not because they disbelieve it, but because they cannot sustain the emotional weight of knowing. Not-knowing becomes a way of staying intact, of rationing attention and anxiety in order to keep functioning.
For policy-makers and communicators, it is therefore important to recognise that more information is not always better. What may well matter more is whether people feel supported, trusted, and able to act without being overwhelmed.
Risks becoming less knowable
Added to this is the way that the risks we face are increasingly less knowable. Ulrich Beck’s write about this in the Risk Society: the science, industry and technology that has been built to manage old dangers have created new ones that Beck argues are global, probabilistic, and often beyond comprehension. They cross borders, generations, and systems, making them indeterminate and unmanageable through traditional means.
Chemicals appear to embody this shift from old dangers to new. They were first hailed as solutions: fertilisers to tackle famine, pesticides to safeguard crops, chlorine to make water drinkable, flame retardants to prevent household fires. Each was designed to shield humanity from threats that had haunted earlier generations such as hunger, disease, accident, decay. And they have been hugely successful in these missions.
But the very tools that solved yesterday’s dangers have generated new ones of their own. Fertilisers now leach into rivers, creating dead zones; pesticides accumulate through ecosystems, destabilising species and human health; chlorine derivatives linger as toxic by-products; flame retardants are found in human blood and breast milk.
The industrial economy has created millions of novel chemical entities, and yet we lack the tools to trace their long-term effects. Endocrine-disrupting chemicals, for instance, can produce stronger effects at low doses than at high ones, a pattern that defies traditional toxicology models. Here the risk is not just large; it is structurally resistant to being known.
Sociologist Anthony Giddens adds that we now live in a condition of reflexive doubt, where established sources of authority and expertise are continuously questioned, and knowledge is subject to constant scrutiny and revision. Climate scientists update projections with every new dataset; economists re-run forecasts in the face of unpredictable shocks; epidemiologists adjust guidance as viruses mutate. And the public, increasingly aware of these revisions, no longer treats expert pronouncements as settled fact but as provisional, subject to correction, contradiction, or reversal.
Artificial intelligence plays directly into this atmosphere of unknowability. Algorithmic decision-making introduces risks that are not only opaque to laypeople but often to the specialists who build or regulate these systems. Black-box models can deliver outputs no one can fully explain, producing consequences — from biased hiring systems to misfiring credit scores — that escape prediction until after the harm is done.
This all suggests that the challenge is not simply that risks are multiplying, but that they are becoming resistant to full comprehension. They defy the older dream of mastery through calculation and instead demand that we navigate uncertainty as a permanent condition.
Institutions of Knowing
Although the Cassandra problem shows us the emotional weight of knowing, and why people might sometimes avoid it, our institutions often seem to push in the opposite direction. Critical analysis of schools, universities, and workplaces suggest that the demand is not to acknowledge uncertainty but to perform certainty. Success is measured by confidence, fluency, and decisiveness, even when the underlying knowledge is partial or fragile. The result is a culture with little room for doubt or hesitation.
Even the university, long imagined as a sanctuary for exploration and doubt, has not escaped this logic. Scholars such as Bill Readings (The University in Ruins, 1996) and Martha Nussbaum (Not for Profit, 2010) argue that the academy has shifted from cultivating open inquiry to producing measurable outputs — rankings, impact metrics, employability scores. This is not just bureaucratic drift but a profound epistemic narrowing. As Stanley Fish once put it, universities increasingly reward “being right” over “learning to think.”
The state of knowledge reflects what William Deresiewicz calls “world-class hoop jumping”: signalling authority or inferring there is a solid position even where the knowledge is fragile. In Excellent Sheep, he describes how elite students are trained to be overachieving but under-inquiring: brilliant at fulfilling expectations, but rarely asking why those expectations exist. So rather than embracing this uncertainty, institutions double down on rituals of knowledge and control.
On this basis not-knowing is all too often a marginalised activity - economically punished, socially pathologised, and pedagogically erased. Knowing becomes less a process of discovery than an identity, a signal of belonging.
In a Risk Society defined by reflexive doubt, this is a dangerous irony: critics suggest that the very places that should surely teach us to navigate uncertainty, instead run the danger of training us to deny it.
Living through not-knowing
Perhaps even more importantly we can see how not-knowing is in fact something much broader, that it is the ground we all stand on. Human societies only function because we live with, and through, what we do not know. Philosopher of language Paul Grice showed that communication rests less on fact-checking than on cooperation, we assume sincerity, we trust without verification. As psychologist David Dunning (of Dunning-Kruger effect fame) has argued, without this tacit willingness to take others at their word, everyday life would be unworkable. We don’t interrogate every claim from friends, colleagues, or strangers; we inhabit a world where some ignorance is not only tolerated but necessary.
This extends to how we think we know. Psychologists Steven Sloman, and Philip Fernbach have demonstrated the knowledge illusion: people routinely believe they understand more than they do, because they unconsciously outsource detail to their community. We can say ‘mortgage,’ ‘arthritis,’ or ‘algorithmic bias’ without being able to explain them fully, because the social world provides scaffolding that makes my shallow knowledge usable. Hilary Putnam called this the division of linguistic labour: words and labels carry the weight of communal expertise, even if no individual holds it all. In this sense, our not-knowing is not a bug but a design feature.
Wittgenstein understood this when he insisted that meaning is not held privately in our heads but in shared use. A label is meaningful because others can agree or reject it; its explanatory force comes from communal entrenchment. Knowing, then, is less about mastery than about being able to move fluently in a system where the bulk of knowledge is elsewhere.
Seen this way, not-knowing is not an obstacle to social life instead it is its very medium. We survive, coordinate, and build futures not by erasing ignorance but by weaving it into a collective fabric. The demand that every individual always know is both unrealistic and destructive. Our capacity to live together depends on accepting that much of what sustains us, from trust to expertise to shared labels, rests on things we do not, and cannot, fully know.
Collective curiosity
That is why recognition of not-knowing is surely more urgent than ever. If the problems are collective, then curiosity also becomes collective, a resource we pool and protect. Citizens’ climate assemblies across Europe have shown what this looks like: when ordinary people are invited to grapple with messy trade-offs, rather than being handed neat conclusions, the result can be deeper trust, greater legitimacy, and more robust recommendations. In Ireland, assemblies on abortion and same-sex marriage created the conditions for historic constitutional change because citizens were treated as capable of holding uncertainty together.
We see this reflected in Nick Chater and George Loewenstein’s paper where they set out the case that the curiosity that comes from not-knowing, is not a luxury but a drive (like hunger or thirst) borne of where we notice an information gap and feel compelled to bridge it. But if the gap is closed too quickly, then the drive dissipates - certainty satisfies in the short term but risks shutting down the energy that fuels exploration and learning. In other words, premature ‘knowing’ can act as a curiosity kill switch.
By contrast, leaving some questions open sustains the drive to make sense together. Behavioural research suggests that grappling with competing cues and partial truths, rather than being fed neat answers, can result in longer-lasting engagement and deeper understanding. The discomfort of ambiguity is not an obstacle to change but the ignition.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, there is some evidence that countries that acknowledged uncertainty openly, explaining what was known, what wasn’t, and how policies might change, maintained higher public trust than those that insisted on false clarity. In the current heated debates over AI governance we see something similar: the most credible conversations seem to be not those promising ‘safe AI’ through technical fixes alone, but those that admit the limits of knowledge and invite citizens, workers, and affected communities into ongoing negotiation.
Not-knowing, in this sense, is not the opposite of progress but its condition. It legitimises hesitation, sustains contestation, and keeps questions alive. It creates the space for course correction and collective learning. Which is why rushing to foreclose uncertainty, to insist on the performance of certainty, doesn’t just flatten curiosity. It undermines our ability to act together at all.
In conclusion
The implications here for those involved in behaviour change suggest a delicate balance between knowing and not-knowing. It would be a foolhardy act to design a behaviour change programme without recognising the importance of information, albeit delivered in a way that is relevant, timely and consistent with the way the target population understands the world.
But to leave it at this means we risk acting in a manner that is too ‘top-down’, appearing to dispense explanations (with accompanying guidance on what-to-do) to an uninformed population who ‘ought to know better’. This approach is rapidly looking out dated, people want to learn from each other be ‘part of the solution’. Curiosity is what researcher Carmen Valor might call an ‘activating emotion’, something that encourages behaviour change.
Of course, this creates a challenge for those that represent bodies of expertise – how to navigate the knowing versus not-knowing. Someone coming in for advice on a medical condition may not want to be made aware of the limits of medical knowledge, others might definitely want to. How experts can develop the necessary skills to navigate the rapidly changing epistemic environment is likely to come under ever greater scrutiny.
And while governments, commercial organisations and regulators may be uncomfortable taking a more nuanced position on issues such as chemical pollution (where there is opportunity for some actors to take advantage of this) it does seem that a shift is inevitable as people look for information and guidance from more horiziontal sources (e.g. such as social media).
Overall, not-knowing is the condition under which we have always lived. Social relations in terms of trust, communication, division of labour and shared labels are the machinery that turns our ignorance into intelligence. It seems that to be human is not to master knowledge, but to navigate uncertainty together.