Apathy Killed the Cat in Literature.
- Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling tried to save herself from having to create a coherent magic system by having her viewpoint character tune out whenever theory is mentioned. It worked in the sense that she was able to avoid talking much about how magic actually works, but it does give the reader the impression that Harry is an incredibly apathetic child about this magical world that he suddenly finds himself living in. She used a similar trick for the backstory, having Hermione exposit whatever bit of Hogwarts: a History is currently relevant while Harry steadfastly refused to even look at it.
- The whole premise for several of the works of José Saramago — Death with Interruptions and The Stone Raft come to mind — is to avert this trope: an extremely simple but fantastic setup is provided (death stops operating in a country; the Iberian Peninsula splits off at the French-Spanish border and begins to sail aimlessly around the North Atlantic) and the whole rest of the story analyzes the sociological upheaval it causes.
- To quote
from Fred Clark's series on Left Behind:Here you have God appearing center stage. A direct, incontrovertible divine miracle witnessed by millions. Absolute, doubt-destroying, skeptic-shattering proof of the existence of God. There's freaking divine flame in the sky. Yet it produces nary a ripple of wonder, awe, or spiritual searching. Alone among the millions who witnessed this event, Buck Williams is slightly prompted to be more "spiritually attuned." The people in this novel are not human. - The Lost Fleet: At one point, protagonist and recently-defrosted Human Popsicle John Geary asks his fellow officers a couple of important questions: How and why has a war that both sides knew they could never win dragged on for a century without either side attempting to sue for peace or just flat-out collapse under the terrible cost in lives and resources? Nobody can really give him a satisfactory answer, and worse, it never really occurred to them to ask the question themselves because they'd never known a time when there wasn't a war going on. The answer to both questions ends up being crucial to the resolution of the plot of the whole series: A hitherto-unknown third party has been playing both sides off against each other, including leaking the hypernet gate technology that revived their flagging economies a few decades earlier, so that humanity will be too busy fighting among themselves to be a threat to them.
- In The Otherworld humans occasionally witness surreal incidents and do nothing. In one such instance the witnesses were, in all fairness, stoned, but in Bitten Elena's fiancé watches her turn into a wolf and when she questions him on it later he claims he'd passed out long before she arrived and transformed.
- Parzival fails to achieve the Holy Grail even though it's meant for him because he follows advice to not be too curious and doesn't ask about the Fisher King's injury. The poem is based on Chrétien de Troyes' unfinished poem, in which Perceval's failure to ask about an entire procession of miraculous oddities because he's trying to be proper also results in the continued languishing of the Fisher King and his kingdom.
- In Orson Scott Card's novel Pastwatch: The Redemption of Christopher Columbus society possesses a time viewer that is cheap enough for graduate students working on research projects to use. However, it is mentioned numerous times that Christianity, Islam, and other religions still exist, even though proving or disproving those religion's veracity would be the first thing most people would use a time viewer for. And there isn't a rule against investigating religion or anything, because one character made a name for himself by investigating the historical events inspiring the legend of Noah.
- It's stated that all religious revelations are conveniently too subjective to confirm. (Except Columbus's, which is definitely mundane.) That still leaves the question of miracles, though.
- Averted and played straight several times in an early Star Trek: Voyager novel. When Neelix leads Voyager to a planet full of wrecked ships (needed for critical spare parts), Torres and Kim promptly began an exhaustive examination of the one powered vessel. Neelix, not caring and deciding that he is useless, decides to take a nap. This sends the ship (a passenger time machine) back in time. Later, we meet an operative whose job is to scare away any "Planet-Hoppers" (the term this people use to refer to the "crazy" races that use dangerous space travel instead of safe time travel) from the abandoned eras of the planet. His main weapon is strange events that the intruders don't care to investigate properly.
- In Bernard Werber's Thanathonauts series, the world promptly forgets about the initially world-shaking discovery that there is indeed an afterlife (and that it is quite bureaucratic at that). In another series, little is expounded upon the ramification of a porcine direct relationships to humans.
- Arguably the main reason H. P. Lovecraft's The Thing on the Doorstep ends in tragedy — the villain's plot to take over the body of Edward Derby plays out over months if not years with obvious warning signs of what's going on, yet despite the narrator and the victim being ostensibly best friends neither actually does anything until it's finally way too late.
- The Twilight Saga has Bella's father's motto: "need to know basis". He probably figures out about vampires but doesn't want details. Seeing how the Volturi would kill him if he knew it makes a lot of sense. It wouldn't take much to figure out that vampires probably would be lethal to humans in the know.
