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What is the ostrich syndrome?
The ostrich effect, also known as the ostrich problem, is a cognitive bias that describes how people often avoid negative information, including feedback that could help them monitor their goal progress. Instead of dealing with the situation, we bury our heads in the sand, like ostriches...
Effectively, the ostrich effect is a cognitive bias that causes people to avoid information that they perceive as potentially unpleasant. For example, the ostrich effect can cause someone to avoid looking at their bills, because they’re worried about seeing how far behind they are on their payments.
Information avoidance can lead to detrimental outcomes in a variety of situations, so it’s important to understand it. The ostrich effect can be a serious drawback to tackling societal problems. Why? Well, its necause it’s so overwhelming to contemplate the severity and complexity of certain issues, it’s often easier to defer to elected officials in order to ignore them entirely; and thus, it becomes easier to reject information that contradicts one's subjective stance in order to glam onto a politically correst acceptable official stance.
What's wrong with that? A lot! The ostrich effect is a serious social pitfall. Why? Because, taking such a position never gets at the root of the social problem at hand. What happens the? The ostrich syndrome/effect kicks the can down the road so to speak and such a can, if kicked hard enough by many players/contributors, can be kicked pretty darn far.
In fact, the can has been kicked so far down the road that generations remain with their heads in the sand about the same social pitfalls. Sure, they may have taken on different colors, labels or status, but the problems remains and society weakens.
Doesn't it seem like that the problem for our society today? Who has their head in the sand and about what? Many people do and it does not matter which political party they belong to or how much education they have or what skills they posses or church they go to. There have always been such people - people who avoid information! Whether its information that has been proven or not, scientifically justified or religiously verified, doesn't seem to matter.
Of course, it does have something to do with how one was raised, who was the main care giver, was there any dysfunction, abuse, or over indulging in the self... not only the child but the entire society.
What does matter is one's own cognitive ability to take in vast amounts of information, conflicting information and deal with logically, rationally and socially. We attempted to answer who but now... about what? The same problems that have always been a blight on mankind throughout the eons. The list goes like this: sex, role relationships, power, money, land, guns, war, and the attitude toward new life as either precious or something to discard.
In all this, the social imagination plays the greatest part because that depends on every individual's ability to fit in with the group, with the norm of the group... to be approved, accepted and succeed in the mess of information that composes the social reality in the social imagination. Information that is coming at everyone every second of the day.
Remember, we live in an information reality... And, that is not easy to deal with, process and put in its place. But, it must be dealt with lest we fall into an eternal ostrich syndrome. How? Take our heads out and look at things as they really are physically in the place where they are and what the means in order for a stable social reality housed in the collective social imagination. We just can't let the imagination run wild either... that's why things must be called out as they are presented to us... especially at birth.
*Online Sources ~ https://effectiviology.com/ostrich-effect/ and https://thedecisionlab.com/biases/ostrich-effect
