Ignorance is maintained by refusing actions that would reveal unwanted knowledge.

Evidence

One remains uninformed about what one does not want to know by not doing what would reveal it. It took hundreds of molested children before the cardinal decided to find out whether being sexually abused by a priest is enduringly harmful to young children (Lovett, 2013). — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 522

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: Condenses a whole theory of willed ignorance into one sentence and grounds it in a concrete historical case.
• XREF: Directly parallels vault claims about ordinary people rationalizing support for harmful policy by declining to seek confirming evidence.
• ADDENDUM: Supports the sacrifice/complicity human-capacity thread: the mechanism of looking away that enables participation in harm.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement: How People Do Harm…, 522