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As a result of these shifts in perception, problems arise when a headline is ever so slightly misleading. “Air pollution now leading cause of lung cancer,” ran a headline last year in the U.K. paper Daily Express. The article, however, said no such thing, or, rather, not exactly. Instead, it reported that pollution was a leading “environmental” cause; other causes, like smoking, are still the main culprits. It is easy to understand a decision to run that sort of opening. Caveats don’t fit in single columns, and, once people are intrigued enough to read the story, they’ll get to the nuances just the same. But, as it turns out, reading the piece may not be enough to correct the headline’s misdirection. It’s these sorts of misleading maneuvers that Ullrich Ecker, a psychologist and cognitive neuroscientist at the University of Western Australia, was pondering when he decided to test how slight—and slightly misleading—shifts in headlines can affect reading. In Ecker’s prior work, he had looked at explicit misinformation: when information that’s biased influences you, no matter what you’re subsequently told. This time around, he wanted to see how nuance and slight misdirection would work.

The current problem is, in part, an unintended consequence of previous efforts to aid the environment.The British government provided financial incentives to encourage a shift to diesel engines because laboratory tests suggested that would cut harmful emissions and combat climate change. Yet, it turned out that diesel cars emit on average five times as much emissions in real-world driving conditions as in the tests, according to a British Department for Transport study.

I have just returned with a team of scientists from six weeks at sea conducting research in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch — one of five major garbage patches drifting in the oceans north and south of the equator at the latitude of our great terrestrial deserts. Although it was my 10th voyage to the area, I was utterly shocked to see the enormous increase in the quantity of plastic waste since my last trip in 2009. Plastics of every description, from toothbrushes to tires to unidentifiable fragments too numerous to count floated past our marine research vessel Alguita for hundreds of miles without end. We even came upon a floating island bolstered by dozens of plastic buoys used in oyster aquaculture that had solid areas you could walk on.

A series of studies suggests that, while a product’s ethics may influence purchasing decisions, many shoppers choose simply not to know whether something was ethically made. That includes shoppers who care about social responsibility. And shoppers who ignore ethical matters can even develop a negative opinion about people who do express ethical concerns—which makes them even less likely to pay attention to ethical issues in the future.

“You feel badly that you were not ethical when someone else was,” Rebecca Reczek, a professor of marketing at Ohio State University and one of the study’s authors, told NPR about the results. “It’s a threat to your sense of self, to your identity. So to recover from that, you put the other person down.”

International supply chains, she points out, are notoriously opaque, and the free market doesn’t have any good way to deal with the way this system stifles information. It might be best, she says, if these matters were regulated before the products even reached consumers, taking ethical dilemmas out of the shopping equation. Of the unethical choice, like a polluting car or a shirt made with exploited labor, she suggests: “Maybe we just shouldn’t have it available.”