I’m in a hurry, I don't want to know! Strategic ignorance under time pressure.

Information avoidance is common when privately beneficial choices have uncertain and potentially adverse effects on others.A dominant theory holds that such "strategic ignorance" allows decision makers to circumvent inner moral conflict while acting self-servingly.In extension of this theory, we hypothesize that time pressure elevates the prevalence of strategic ignorance.We conduct a laboratory experiment with resolvable payoff uncertainty to test this hypothesis.We find that time pressure indeed significantly increases the incidence of information avoidance.As a result, self-serving choices are more common than in a baseline without time pressure.We empirically explore several potential interpretations of this main finding.First, in a control condition, in which payoffs are fully transparent, time pressure has no direct effect on self-serving behavior.This speaks against a general tendency to act more self-servingly or fairly under time pressure.Second, a follow-up study shows that information avoidance under time pressure is due to conflict avoidance, rather than providing decision makers with a convenient excuse for not becoming informed.We discuss these observations in the context of a recent body of literature on the cognitive underpinnings of pro-social behavior and argue that they have significant implications for information-based approaches to public policy.