Science

Thanks for the link. However, it doesn't seem to support the assertion that "independents are people who don't want to admit they're uninterested in politics."

Rather, it seems to support that those (Americans) who refuse to pick a side are unpredictable in their preferences.

It even says:

The upshot of all this is that if you’re a campaign trying to appeal to independents, moderates or undecided voters — or a concerned citizen trying to make sense of these groups in the context of an election — policy and ideology aren’t good frames of reference. There just isn’t much in terms of policy or ideology that unites these groups.

The closest thing to your assertion in here is this opinion:

As the political scientists Donald Kinder and Nathan Kalmoe put it, after looking at five decades of public opinion research, “the moderate category seems less an ideological destination than a refuge for the innocent and the confused.”

NB: "the moderate category," as distinct from independents. The article even takes pains to separate them:

Moderate, independent and undecided voters are not the same, and none of these groups are reliably centrist. They are ideologically diverse