#feigned ignorance

By: Elizabeth Shaw

Published: May 2, 2025

Feigned Ignorance: The Narcissist’s Favourite Defence

How pretending not to know becomes a calculated tool of manipulation

Narcissists are masters of control. But unlike what many assume, they don’t always maintain it through shouting, aggression, or open hostility. Sometimes, the most damaging manipulation comes wrapped in innocence. Enter feigned ignorance, the narcissist’s favourite defence. It’s the art of pretending not to understand, not to notice, or not to know. And make no mistake, it’s rarely genuine. It’s deliberate. Strategic. And incredibly effective.

At first glance, it may appear harmless. Who hasn’t genuinely forgotten something or misunderstood a situation? But with narcissists, this behaviour is rarely innocent. It’s not about a lack of understanding, it’s about avoiding accountability, shifting blame, and keeping you in a position where you are always the one who feels uncertain.

Avoiding Responsibility

One of the most common uses of feigned ignorance is to dodge responsibility. You confront them about something hurtful, expecting a conversation, or even just an acknowledgement. But instead, you’re met with confusion.

“I didn’t know that would upset you.” “I thought you were fine with it.” “No one told me that was wrong.”

These statements seem harmless on the surface. But when repeated often, they become a pattern. A way to sidestep apology. A means of excusing behaviour without ever having to change it. You’re left second-guessing your own reaction. Were you too sensitive? Did you overreact? The narcissist walks away unscathed, while you carry the emotional weight of a situation they orchestrated.

Manipulating Your Perception

Narcissists crave admiration and control, but they also fear exposure. Feigning ignorance is a convenient mask. If they pretend they didn’t know what they were doing, they can still appear innocent. They get to play the role of the ‘nice guy’ or the ‘misunderstood partner’, while continuing the same damaging behaviour behind the scenes.

This tactic is designed to manipulate how others see them, and how you see yourself. You start questioning whether their actions were intentional or if you’re just imagining things. This self-doubt erodes your confidence over time, making it harder to stand your ground or recognise patterns of abuse.

Deflecting Blame

When caught out in a lie or contradiction, the narcissist rarely admits fault. Instead, they’ll reach for feigned ignorance as a shield.

“I didn’t mean it that way.” “I didn’t realise it mattered.” “You never said that was a problem.”

These responses redirect the focus away from what they’ve done, and place it back on you. Suddenly, the issue isn’t their behaviour—it’s your reaction to it. You find yourself explaining the basics again and again, hoping they’ll finally understand. But they do understand. They just don’t want to be held accountable.

Creating Doubt and Confusion

Confusion is a key tool in the narcissist’s arsenal. The more uncertain you feel, the easier you are to control. Feigned ignorance plays directly into this. When a narcissist claims they don’t know what you’re talking about or denies any recollection of events, it causes you to pause.

You begin to ask yourself questions: Did I misread the situation? Did I fail to explain myself properly? Was it really that bad? Before you know it, you’re doing mental gymnastics to justify their actions. This is exactly where they want you—off balance, uncertain, and easier to influence.

Escaping Consequences

Narcissists are notorious for avoiding the consequences of their actions. Feigned ignorance is a convenient exit door. Whether it’s breaking a promise, betraying your trust, or behaving in a hurtful way, pretending not to know better allows them to move on without facing any fallout.

They might say, “You should’ve reminded me,” or “I didn’t know it was that important.” This tactic not only evades accountability, but it subtly shifts the blame onto you. Now you’re the one who didn’t explain things well enough or failed to communicate. Once again, they escape the consequences while you’re left trying to repair the damage.

Gaslighting in Action

Feigned ignorance is often just one part of a larger gaslighting strategy. Gaslighting is the systematic erasure of your reality. The narcissist chips away at your perception until you no longer trust your own mind. By acting clueless about things they absolutely know, they make you question your memory, your feelings, and your sanity.

You might say, “You said that yesterday,” and they’ll reply, “I never said that.” Or you’ll bring up a recurring issue, and they’ll claim, “This is the first I’m hearing of it.” Over time, you begin to feel unsure of what’s real. This makes you increasingly dependent on them for clarity, when in truth, they are the source of the confusion.

Sustaining the Victim Persona

Perhaps most insidiously, feigned ignorance allows narcissists to maintain a victim narrative. If they pretend not to understand what they’ve done wrong, they can position themselves as misunderstood or unfairly criticised.

They might say things like, “I’m always doing something wrong in your eyes,” or “No matter what I do, it’s never good enough.” These statements evoke sympathy and guilt from others, even from you. Before long, you find yourself comforting them, reassuring them that they’re not a bad person, even when they’ve just hurt you.

This keeps the narcissist in control. They’ve managed to deflect blame, maintain their image, and manipulate your emotions, all while avoiding any real change.

Recognising the Tactic

The key to protecting yourself from this manipulation is to recognise it for what it is. Genuine misunderstandings happen, but they’re followed by learning, apologies, and changed behaviour. Narcissistic feigned ignorance, on the other hand, is repetitive, strategic, and hollow.

If someone constantly “doesn’t know,” “didn’t realise,” or “forgot,” yet continues to repeat the same patterns, it’s not a mistake. It’s a tactic. They’re not clueless. They’re cunning.

You’re not imagining things. You’re not too sensitive. And you’re not wrong for expecting basic respect and accountability.

Final Thoughts

Feigned ignorance is one of the narcissist’s most effective tools. It disarms you. It buys them time. It keeps you explaining, justifying, and questioning yourself. But once you understand it, the power starts to shift.

Awareness is the first step toward freedom. When they act like they don’t know, remind yourself that they often do. And even if they didn’t before—you’ve told them now. The choice to repeat the behaviour isn’t ignorance. It’s intention.

These men are, should you not recognize the type, wide-eyed and perennially confused. What's the difference, the male bumbler wonders, between a friendly conversation with a coworker and rubbing one's penis in front of one? Between grooming a 14-year-old at her custody hearing and asking her out?

The world baffles the bumbler. He's astonished to discover that he had power over anyone at all, let alone that he was perceived as using it. What power? he says. Who, me?

The bumbler doesn't know things, even things about which he was directly informed. Jon Stewart was "stunned" by the Louis C.K. revelations, even though we watched someone ask him about them last year.

There's a reason for this plague of know-nothings: The bumbler's perpetual amazement exonerates him. Incompetence is less damaging than malice. And men — particularly powerful men — use that loophole like corporations use off-shore accounts. The bumbler takes one of our culture's most muscular myths — that men are clueless — and weaponizes it into an alibi.

Allow me to make a controversial proposition: Men are every bit as sneaky and calculating and venomous as women are widely suspected to be. And the bumbler — the very figure that shelters them from this ugly truth — is the best and hardest proof.

Breaking that alibi means dissecting that myth. The line on men has been that they're the only gender qualified to hold important jobs and too incompetent to be responsible for their conduct. Men are great but transparent, the story goes: What you see is what you get. They lack guile.

The "privilege" argument holds that this is partly true because men have never needed to deceive. This interesting Twitter thread by Holden Shearer has been making the rounds: "One of the oldest canards in low-denominator comedy is that women are inscrutable and men can't understand them. There's a reason for this and it ain't funny," he writes. The thread is right about the structural problems with lowbrow "women are so confusing!" comedy. "Women VERY frequently say one thing and mean another, display expressions or reactions that don't jibe with their feelings, and so on. But it's actually really easy to decode once you understand why it happens. It is survival behavior," Shearer writes.

But nested in that account is the assumption that the broad majority of men are not dissemblers. The majority are — you guessed it — bumblers! If you've noticed a tendency to treat girls — like the 14-year-old whom now-Senate candidate Roy Moore allegedly picked up at her custody hearing — as knowing adults and men in their 30s — like Trump foreign policy adviser George Papadopoulos and Donald Trump, Jr. — as erring youngsters, large sons and "coffee boys," this is why. Our culture makes that script available. It's why Sessions is so often referred to as an "elf" instead of a gifted manipulator (here's a very clever analysis of his strategy, which weaponizes our tendency to read white men — even very old attorneys with a long history of maliciously undermining civil rights — as slow, meandering children who know not what they do.)”

What is the best excuse you have heard lately? I don’t know about “best” but my “favorite” (yes, I’m being sarcastic) excuse is “I didn’t know.” Of course there’s variations on this but it comes down to the person claiming they didn’t know how to do something, that they had to do it, or anything along those lines. Sure, there are times this is not an excuse but a reality, however often its what…

In the dark alleys of Harlem, where shadows danced to the tune of hustlers and conmen, there lived a man named Rufus. Rufus had a peculiar talent; he could feign ignorance like no other. With a tilt of his hat and a shrug of his shoulders, he played the fool to perfection, fooling even the sharpest of minds.

Rufus wandered the streets, his eyes glazed with an air of obliviousness, but beneath that facade lay a mind sharp as a razor. He would stumble into conversations, feigning confusion at every turn, yet absorbing every word like a sponge.

But as Rufus delved deeper into his act, something strange began to happen. His pretense of ignorance became so convincing that it began to seep into his very being. He found himself forgetting things he once knew, his mind clouded by the haze of his own deception.

Day by day, Rufus slipped further into the abyss of his own making. He forgot names, faces, even the streets he once called home. His once keen intellect dulled to a mere flicker, drowned out by the relentless tide of feigned ignorance.

The Milspouse Who Knew Too Much

“Honey, could you make me popcorn this time?” I asked without looking up from my crochet project one night last week. Working on a deadline, I had a dozen rows to stitch before our television show was over.  Ever since my husband, Francis, and I started a new diet, we’d been fighting the nighttime munchies. To us, turning on the television was like ringing Pavlov’s dog bell — our mouths began to…

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