How much do YOU want to know?
University
College London
Most
people fall into one of three 'information-seeking types': those that mostly
consider the impact of information on their feelings when deciding whether to
get informed, those that mostly consider how useful information will be for
making decisions, and those that mostly seek information about issues they
think about often, according to the findings published in Nature
Communications.
Co-lead author Professor Tali Sharot (UCL Psychology & Language Sciences and Max Planck UCL Centre for Computational Psychiatry and Ageing Research) said: "Vast amounts of information are now available to individuals. This includes everything from information about your genetic make-up to information about social issues and the economy.
We wanted to find out: how do people decide
what they want to know? And why do some people actively seek out information,
for example about COVID vaccines, financial inequality and climate change, and
others don't?
"The
information people decide to expose themselves to has important consequences
for their health, finance and relationships. By better understanding why people
choose to get informed, we could develop ways to convince people to educate
themselves."
The
researchers conducted five experiments with 543 research participants, to gauge
what factors influence information-seeking.
In
one of the experiments, participants were asked how much they would like to
know about health information, such as whether they had an Alzheimer's risk
gene or a gene conferring a strong immune system. In another experiment, they
were asked whether they wanted to see financial information, such as exchange
rates or what income percentile they fall into, and in another one, whether
they would have liked to learn how their family and friends rated them on traits
such as intelligence and laziness.
Later,
participants were asked how useful they thought the information would be, how
they expected it would make them feel, and how often they thought about each
subject matter in question.
The
researchers found that people choose to seek information based on these three
factors: expected utility, emotional impact, and whether it was relevant to
things they thought of often. This three-factor model best explained decisions
to seek or avoid information compared to a range of other alternative models
tested.
Some
participants repeated the experiments a couple of times, months apart. The
researchers found that most people prioritise one of the three motives
(feelings, usefulness, frequency of thought) over the others, and their
specific tendency remained relatively stable across time and domains,
suggesting that what drives each person to seek information is 'trait-like'.
In
two experiments, participants also filled out a questionnaire to gauge their
general mental health. The researchers found that when people sought
information about their own traits, participants who mostly wanted to know
about traits they thought about often, reported better mental health.
Co-lead
author, PhD student Christopher Kelly (UCL Psychology & Language Sciences
and Max Planck UCL Centre for Computational Psychiatry and Ageing Research)
said: "By understanding people's motivations to seek information, policy
makers may be able to increase the likelihood that people will engage with and
benefit from vital information. For example, if policy makers highlight the
potential usefulness of their message and the positive feelings that it may
elicit, they may improve the effectiveness of their message.
"The
research can also help policy makers decide whether information, for instance
on food labels, needs to be disclosed, by describing how to fully assess the
impact of information on welfare. At the moment policy-makers overlook the
impact of information on people's emotions or ability to understand the world around
them, and focus only on whether information can guide decisions."
The
study was funded by Wellcome.