When is too much knowledge a bad thing?

Cornell University economics professor Kaushik Basu and Jörgen Weibull, professor emeritus at the Stockholm School of Economics, are co-authors of "A Knowledge Curse: How Knowledge Can Reduce Human Welfare," published Aug. 7 in Royal Society Open Science.

According to the pair, even for a group of rational individuals, greater knowledge can backfire. And, they said, enhanced knowledge about an existing reality -- such as the cost-benefit of wearing a face mask to help prevent the spread of disease -- may hinder cooperation among purely self-interested individuals.

"We assume that a scientific breakthrough that gives us a deeper understanding of the world can only help," said Basu. "Our paper shows that in the real world, where many people live and strive individually or in small groups to do well for themselves, this intuition may not hold. Science may not be the panacea we take it to be."

Basu and Weibull build the case -- with modeling in a theoretical two-player Base Game -- that the "knowledge curse" can happen if, at first, only a few people are privy to the greater knowledge.

In the Base Game, each player has two actions to choose from. There are four combinations of actions, each with expected payoffs to both players. Each player chooses to maximize their own payoff.

However, if another set of options is added that introduces the chance that the other player would get nothing, along with an option of a very small payoff for both, the mutual small reward becomes more appealing -- a form of the Prisoner's Dilemma, in which two "prisoners" can either cooperate for mutual benefit or betray their partner for individual reward. In other words, more "knowledge" can lead to worse overall outcomes.

The paper goes further and shows that a scientific breakthrough that does not add any new option but simply deepens the players' understanding of the payoffs and their fluctuations can make the players worse off.

The authors extend their theoretical calculations into real-world dilemmas, such as crafting policy without knowing the full contours of a problem. The drafting of a nation's constitution, for instance, must anticipate and address problems likely to occur well into a future with unknowable sets of circumstances. "Such preemptive laws have conferred large benefits to humankind," the authors wrote.

"By drawing attention to this paradoxical result," Basu said, "the paper urges policymakers and even the lay person to think of preemptive actions, agreements and moral commitments that we as human beings should take and make to avert disasters that future scientific advances can cause.

"Science can yield huge benefits, but we need safeguards," he said. "What those are, we do not know. But the paper urges us to pay attention to this."

Funding for this research came from the Jan Wallander and Tom Hedelius Foundation.