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Whether people inform themselves or remain ignorant is due to three factors:
"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.
[...] 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.
Journal Reference:
Christopher A. Kelly, Tali Sharot. Individual differences in information-seeking [open], Nature Communications (DOI: 10.1038/s41467-021-27046-5)
(Score: 2, Insightful) by khallow on Wednesday December 08 2021, @01:28PM (4 children)
"Emotional impact", right?
(Score: 2) by driverless on Wednesday December 08 2021, @01:48PM (2 children)
And/or expected utility. I'm not going to read a 500-page book on the History of Ethiopian Pottery in 4000BC just because I see it sitting on a shelf, I'd expect to either learn something (utility) or derive enjoyment (impact).
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 08 2021, @05:37PM (1 child)
How about a book about sporting ladies on other planets?
(Spoiler: it's all talk.)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 08 2021, @09:02PM
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Rich on Wednesday December 08 2021, @02:05PM
My hypothesis of how the mind works is that it consists of layers of neural networks with feedback, stacked for abstractions. Some people have less layers, some have more. Part of the feedback mechanism is the amount of perceived order (arrangement, symmetry, completeness...). Achieving such order is rewarded. As one notices the incompleteness of information, the urge to complete it is created. You'll note that if information is offered, but withheld, the subject will want to get it, while the subject would usually not go on a quest for it out of the blue.