Why do people know so little about what they seem to care so much about?

Sometime in 2016 I realized: 1) climate change is bad and that I should find out how to mitigate my impact and support efforts addressing the issue, and 2) voting is important and I should participate more in elections and support organizations expanding this kind of participation. So, I started looking into things. I found out a lot of interesting details and complexities, and started doing more.

That year the election loomed large and was a frequent topic of conversation. Around many an office, bar or dinner table, I'd hear impassioned statements from colleagues, friends, and family about the importance of participation. I'd then ask them if they were registered to vote. Most often they'd reply they didn't know, and moreover, they didn't know where to check or when the deadline was. This happened again and again, and not just around voting. No one I talked to about climate change knew the scientific consensus around our carbon budget for staying under 2 degrees of warming, or often that there even was such a concept.

This strikes me as odd. There should be at least a rough correspondence between how strongly someone feels about an issue and how much they know about it. I mean, if you didn't know very much, what would you be feeling so strongly about? In the case of voting, however, that correspondence didn't seem to hold. People just really didn't know... anything about the mechanics of elections, campaigns, or what they could do to support turnout. Which made me wonder: why do people know so little about what they seem to care so much about? Below are a few possibilities.

1. People actually just want to "be part of the conversation." Maybe people don't actually care about the issues in question. What they care about is talking about what's being talked about. It just happens to be that politics (or some other social or cultural issue) is what people are talking about, so they too want to talk about it. All that matters is knowing enough to participate in the conversation. Knowing too much is useless, because others don't know anything beyond the NPR or New York Times summary either, so talking in detail would just go past them or worse, feel condescending.

2. People want to signal group membership. Or maybe what they care about is signaling to in-group members that they're on our team. They care so much about the issue because we care so much the issue and they're one of us. The point is to let others know that you're on the same side. That usually means just saying the right thing about one or another issue. Depending on the company you might have to show somewhat more commitment, but most other information beyond what's needed to show membership becomes redundant so knowing specifics doesn't really matter.

3. Knowing too much about an issue makes you accountable to what you know. A personal, rather than social possibility is that knowing too much might require you to make difficult changes to your own behavior, or to advocate for changes in others' behavior. If you know, in detail, how bad factory farming is, you may feel compelled to stop eating meat. If you understand that your biggest contribution to climate change is air travel, then might feel pressure to stop flying (or start paying more to offset your carbon footprint), which could be very hard. If you know that improving turnout requires unsexy, unscalable sloggish work like canvassing, then you'll have to dedicate your weekends to that rather than the other fun things you'd planned. Knowing that if you know you'll have to choose between a doing hard thing and feeling guilty, you choose not to know. Ignorance is bliss.

4. Knowing too much about an issues might invalidate your theory of change. Let's say you run a nonprofit aimed at improving academic performance through afterschool guitar lessons. Hopefully guitar lessons help improve academic performance. If you review the literature and they don't, well then that's a problem. Sure, you could say guitar lessons are important for other things, too, but if your funding (and therefore your livelihood) depends on grants from a foundation that only supports organizations working on academic performance, then that's not really an option. Or, if you find that something else completely helps with performance, but you're a former musician who mostly knows how to play guitar, then it's going to be hard for you to change the focus of the organization to doing that thing because, well you don't know anything about that other thing. So, you don't really figure out what's most effective because you're too bound to the status quo.

5. Most important issues are complex and understanding them takes more effort than it's worth. Climate change is very complicated. Interpreting the most elementary facts, like how much carbon we can emit before really bad things happen, requires the proper application of concepts like gigatonne. Anything beyond that requires a level of fact-finding, synthesis, and critical analysis that starts resemble a large research project, which for many isn't exactly fun (or more fun than whatever else they were going to do). People don't have a lot of free time outside of their main commitments like work and family and they don't want to spend their free time finding and interpreting dry scientific or policy papers.

So which is it? I'm not really sure which of these does the most explanatory work. I think for many people (those who don't really identify as activists), 1 and 2 play a large role. Political and cultural issues have become primary vehicles of social participation, which is what most people care about. For those who feel more engaged or interested, I'd probably say 3 and 5 are the biggest. Making significant changes in your life is hard, and it's uncomfortable to feel like you should evangelize when you're still not an expert in an area.