But I’m also glad that you highlight the "political" in your question, because politics gets left out a lot of the time. People have tended to focus more on how corporate actors such as big tobacco, big pharma and big food have all engaged in the strategic production of ignorance. This can sideline the problem of strategic ignorance by governments or the judiciary. It’s one of the reasons why I argue that it is important not to treat strategic ignorance as simply a psychological problem at the individual level. I think it’s better to suggest that different groups in society have enhanced political power to make the deliberate avoidance of inconvenient truths appear more legitimate or defensible than it really is. To give one example, when he was prime minister, Tony Blair put pressure on the former attorney general Lord Goldsmith to halt an investigation into bribery at BAE Systems. Blair didn’t want the embarrassment of having corruption at a major British firm exposed, and his effort to shut down the legal investigation is a type of strategic ignorance.

Behavioural economists and psychologists, on the one hand, tend to define strategic ignorance in a psychological way. They see it as the personal avoidance of inconvenient or uncomfortable facts.