In the modern world, information is readily available to inform decisions both great—on health, finance, or politics, for example—and small. However, decision-makers are not always eager to take advantage of the information at their fingertips, especially if they fear that it will be painful. Such willful ignorance can have dire consequences for individuals and society. With this in mind, HKUST’s David Hagmann and co-researchers designed and validated an innovative scale to measure individuals’ information preferences—specifically their desire to obtain or avoid information that might be unpleasant but could improve future decisions. Their findings will aid in designing interventions to combat information avoidance.

“Making good decisions is often contingent on obtaining information,” say the authors, “even when that information is uncertain and may be psychologically painful to learn.” In reality, however, the situation is more complex. “Across contexts,” the researchers tell us, “people seem to deliberately and actively avoid information, even when it could be instrumentally useful.” Society can suffer as a result—if, for example, companies ignore employees’ ethical failings, policy makers reject a scientific consensus, or voters refuse to consider other ideological positions.

“Of course, not all individuals avoid potentially unpleasant information in all situations,” note the researchers. This suggests that information preferences may be an important source of individual preferences—one thus far unexplored in the literature. “Despite the many serious consequences that avoiding information may have for society or the individual,” the researchers tell us, “we know little about who these avoiders are.”

To help fill this research gap, the researchers designed a novel scale to measure information preferences. The scale asked respondents to imagine themselves in a series of “realistic and actionable scenarios” in which they could choose to obtain (or not obtain) information. The researchers focused on three domains involving high-stakes decisions: finance, personal characteristics, and health. In these domains, accurate information is crucial and learning from mistakes can improve future well-being. But do people really want to know how well another investment portfolio performs, learn how attractive others find them, or discover their probable life expectancy?

The researchers tested the validity and reliability of their proposed scale in three studies involving more than 2,300 participants, “with a particular focus on its capacity as a behaviorally predictive tool.” Across the studies, the scale was not only behaviorally validated in the focal scenarios and domains but also showed promise in predicting information acquisition behavior in domains beyond those included in the scale itself. “Our results show that the tendency to avoid information varies substantially across individuals,” add the researchers.

Such individual differences in information preferences have crucial policy implications, especially in high-stakes domains such as health and finance. Governments tend to design informational campaigns on the assumption that people want to be informed. Yet this is not always the case. “For those who are disposed to avoid information,” say the authors, “other tactics may need to be explored.” Information seekers and avoiders may benefit from different kinds of messaging. “This work is the first empirical articulation of how interested parties might quantify such subjective preferences and estimate the costs of such individual differences,” conclude the researchers.