Many companies claim to adhere to strict policies about child labor. For example, Apple says that whenever it finds an underage worker in its supply chain, it sends the child home safely, continues paying his or her wages, and even finances the child’s education and offers employment once doing so is legal. Samsung has said that its contracts with any supplier found to use child labor will be terminated immediately.

Yet a recent report by Amnesty International uncovered a number of cases of child labor among suppliers linked to major technology companies, including Apple, Samsung, and Microsoft, as well as to several automotive manufactures, such as Volkswagen and Daimler AG. It discovered that child labor is being used in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) to mine cobalt, an element that is used to make lithium-ion batteries found in many tech devices.

In conducting the report, Amnesty International reached out to the implicated companies to ask about child labor in their supply chains and received a common response: Apple and Microsoft said they are unable to verify whether their products use cobalt from the DRC. Daimler said the same, claiming it is unable to verify such information “due to the high complexity of automotive supply chains.” Samsung SDI, which supplies batteries to both Samsung and Apple, also said determining whether its cobalt is mined in the DRC is impossible.

Is it truly impossible for these companies to determine the source of their raw materials and whether those materials were acquired ethically? Even if it is, couldn’t they work with suppliers to make this information more transparent in the future? More diligence is possible. “In this day and age, it’s not that complicated to work out whether human rights abuses are involved in the sourcing of products on the other side of the world,” said Mark Dummett, business and human rights researcher at Amnesty International. “The world’s getting smaller and companies have a responsibility to assure that these human rights abuses aren’t taking place.”

If companies really care about human rights as they claim to, then why are reports of unethical behavior within supply chains still so commonplace? One possibility that we have studied revolves around willful ignorance: while companies do care about the ethics of their operations, they’re not actively investigating their supply chains to seek out this information.

Our research has shown that willful ignorance is prevalent in consumer contexts. For example, one study found that if consumers have a product’s ethical information right in front of them (e.g., whether it was made using child labor), they will factor the information into their decision making — but they will not go out of their way to seek it out. People remain willfully ignorant because information about ethical attributes can be laden with negative emotion and difficult to process. Choosing to remain blind is a very human coping mechanism.

Companies may be doing the same thing. Leaders may unconsciously choose to ignore ethical information about their supply chains in order to avoid potentially costly consequences, such as having to launch internal investigations. This willful ignorance does not mean that companies won’t correct wrongdoings when they become obvious; they just may not seek them out when such cases are hidden.

Reports like the one by Amnesty International can be helpful for companies trying to be more ethical, because they force them to face ethical issues. However, because these third-party reports often implicate several competing companies at once, the involved companies might feel as though they are no more or less ethical than their counterparts, leading to less willingness to change. In fact, these companies might even choose to distance themselves from companies that are more openly ethical.

In another research project, we found that consumers who do not seek out ethical information when shopping feel threatened by those who do because the “do-gooders” make them feel less ethical. Our study shows that people who remain willfully ignorant disparage their more ethical counterparts as a way to cope.

So although third-party reports on company ethics are crucial, they are not sufficient to spur change. Companies need to publicly commit to specific ethical actions and immediately resolve issues of unethical behavior when they are uncovered. For example, Intel announced at the 2014 Consumer Electronics Show (CES) that all of its processors manufactured that year would use conflict-free materials. It has highlighted the issue at each subsequent CES as well.

The more companies make specific statements of this kind, the more they encourage other companies to pay attention to their own supply chains before problems are exposed. The key is to try to offset the comfort of willful ignorance with the discomfort of breaking a public promise.

We believe that companies like Apple and Samsung that were implicated by Amnesty International do want to make their supply chains more ethical. Our recommendation is for companies to recognize that they comprise decision makers whose psychological mechanisms will make them want to avoid difficult issues. Clear and specific statements of policy, combined with a willingness to correct problems when they are uncovered by third parties, are the best antidote to willful ignorance about supply chains.