A few weeks back, a team of US and Canadian psychologists published some alarming research about ignorance. Their results, they announced, suggested that the less we know about some complex social issue – the economy, the climate – the more we resist trying to find out about it. ("Ignorance IS bliss!" trumpeted the Daily Mail's headline, seemingly in celebration of the pleasures of being ill-informed.) Insert your own joke here, sneering Guardian reader. Specifically, the researchers found that people "outsource" responsibility for knowing about scary subjects to government; for instance, the more economically vulnerable they felt, the more likely they were to avoid consuming information that questioned the government's economic competence. In other words: the worse this economy gets, the more you're going to rationalise that look on George Osborne's face – you know, the one usually reserved, in bad dreams, for realising you're trouserless at the bus stop – as a sign he knows what he's doing.

Partly, this is simply more evidence for the head-in-the-sand phenomenon: the nastier some problem gets, the more distress you'd experience by confronting it, so the harder you struggle to avoid that. But the more intriguing finding had to do with trust: the more complex a problem, the more people trusted government to handle it. And once you've trusted someone, you want to believe they're trustworthy. "Ultimately," one researcher said, "people avoid learning about the issue because that could shatter their faith in the government." Rationally, the more complex an issue, the less you ought to trust others to know what they're doing. But this isn't about rationality. It's about avoiding emotional pain.

Predictably, some right-leaning commentators leapt on the research as proof that government renders us dependent – not that rightwingers come out especially well in the ignorance stakes: a recent survey revealed that Fox News viewers knew less about current events than those who don't watch any news. But the deeper point isn't about politics. Instead, it's the insight on which Scott Peck, three decades ago, based his bestseller The Road Less Travelled: vast swathes of our behaviour is covertly motivated by trying to appoint someone else – a boss, a spouse, a therapist – to be responsible for our problems. (Before that, Erich Fromm had argued that the "fear of freedom" contributed to the rise of Nazism.) To reduce the pain of taking responsibility, we give away our power, argues Peck; this makes sense when we're children, but persisting at it in adulthood breeds resentment and thus, ironically, more of the pain we wanted to avoid. Eventually, he writes, one "must learn that the entirety of one's adult life is a series of personal choices, decisions. If [people] can accept this totally, then they become free people."

None of which is an argument for or against trusting government, or anybody else, but rather about your motivations for doing so: trying to get someone else to take responsibility for your decisions isn't the same as making a decision, for good reasons, to trust them. The problem with trying to escape from decision-making is that that's a decision, too. Or as the psychotherapist, Sheldon Kopp, puts it, in a line we should probably all have imprinted on the backs of our eyelids: "You are free to do whatever you like. You need only face the consequences."

oliver.burkeman@theguardian.com; twitter.com/oliverburkeman