Withholding Information Sows the Seeds of Division Between You and Me
How Censorship Thwarts Our Need for Autonomy
Stop me if you’ve heard this argument before:
It’s necessary to withhold information from people for their own good.
The justifications proffered by proponents of this argument for keeping others in the dark are endless.
The truth will overwhelm them.
They won’t be able to correctly interpret the information presented to them.
They couldn’t possibly understand what the information means.
If they knew, they would feel unnecessarily anxious.
They would rather not know.
Social media companies have been proactive in shielding the public from information that they’ve judged may cause harm to the “simpleminded.” They call it misinformation, and then they censor it. Not one to be outdone, the U.S. government recently announced the creation of a Disinformation Governance Board to disappear any misinformation that slips through social media’s algorithmic sieve. Canada, meanwhile, has pledged to create a Digital Safety Commission to enforce its proposed online harms bill, legislation aimed at censoring harmful online content. Whether it’s withholding information for our supposed own good or censoring so-called misinformation, these practices share an insidious consequence: they thwart our basic psychological need for autonomy.
The need for autonomy is a central component of a theory of human motivation known as self-determination theory.1 Vansteenkiste, Ryan, and Soenens (2020) offer the following definition:
Autonomy refers to the experience of volition and willingness. When satisfied, one experiences a sense of integrity as when one’s actions, thoughts, and feelings are self-endorsed and authentic. When frustrated, one experiences a sense of pressure and often conflict, such as feeling pushed in an unwanted direction.
As humans, we need to feel that we are the author of our own story in order to achieve a sense of well-being. When our need for autonomy is satisfied, we can thrive both psychologically and socially. We feel happier, more optimistic, and less angry or anxious. We become more resilient to stressors and proactive in how we approach our environment. We’re more engaged in our work and we persist more on tasks, making us more productive. We embrace self-discovery, exploring our identity more fully and developing a positive view of ourselves as worthy. We interact more openly with others and are more caring toward our fellow man.
When our need for autonomy is frustrated, our sense of well-being is threatened. We feel unwell and experience physical symptoms of stress. Our psychological functioning and self-control diminish. Our self-esteem becomes contingent on meeting standards or expectations set by others in order to feel worthy. We interact more defensively with others and behave more competitively and aggressively toward them. Our behaviour becomes increasingly fuelled by greed and divisiveness as we struggle to satisfy our basic psychological need.
When you withhold information from another person, whether through censorship or other means, you are effectively deciding for that person what they should or shouldn’t know. You are usurping that person’s autonomy to meet your own need for control. Withholding information is a form of behavioural manipulation. It assumes that I would behave differently if I had access to the information being withheld, which constitutes the motivation for withholding it. You are seeking to shape my behaviour by controlling the information to which I’m exposed. Your intention may be to preserve my well-being, but your actions will only ensure its impairment.
When you withhold information from another person, you are stripping that person of their agency so that you may replace it with your own. You are attempting to control what you cannot possibly control: the workings of another person’s mind. Your labours will never bear the fruit you desire; they will only lead to the rot of your own need for autonomy. Harmful social practices cannot be fully integrated into the self. Our motivation to engage in these practices is therefore not autonomous, but controlled. By withholding information from others, you are entering a vicious circle of autonomy frustration from which you may never escape.
The outbreak of censorship on both social and mainstream media has led to a concurrent outbreak of divisive and aggressive behaviour. We treat disagreement as a call to arms, shooting words like “racist" and “misogynist” from our mouths like bullets from a gun. We demonize those whose decisions or perspectives fail to precisely match our own. Republicans and Democrats view each other as enemies of the state rather than as fellow Americans with different points of view. The vaccinated call for the unvaccinated to be jailed for the crime of making different health choices. Prolonged frustration of our need for autonomy is the likely culprit of this divisiveness. This is the emergency for which the Emergencies Act should have been invoked in Canada. Instead, it was citizens’ determination to satisfy their need for autonomy in the face of control that was deemed the emergency.
Thomas Jefferson once wrote in a letter to William Charles Jarvis:
I know no safe depository of the ultimate powers of the society but the people themselves; and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their control with a wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them, but to inform their discretion by education. This is the true corrective of abuses of constitutional power.
In the spirit of Thomas Jefferson’s words, the next time you are faced with the decision of whether to withhold information or to freely provide it, be autonomy-supportive and choose the latter.
Ryan, R. M., & Deci, E. L. (2017). Self-determination theory: Basic psychological needs in
motivation, development, and wellness. The Guilford Press.