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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) by captain normal on Wednesday December 08 2021, @08:45PM (2 children)
What do you consider "uneducated masses"? People who don't have a college degree? Or is citizenship to be based on some type of literacy? Curious minds might be interested in knowing.
Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not to his own facts"- --Daniel Patrick Moynihan--
(Score: 3, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday December 08 2021, @09:02PM
Effectively, we don't put a lot of very important stuff to vote in the US oligarchy. The federal discount lending rate for one... there are millions of other things that affect people as much or more than whether or not they get vaccinated which are far beyond the voting booth's reach. We have just established these few pesky little things, like our bodies, as stuff the government shouldn't have access to - and occasionally that becomes a real problem.
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(Score: 3, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday December 08 2021, @09:37PM
Not answering the question at all, but blathering on about whatever was on my mind when you were speaking - I'm practicing my political skills....
Of course the poll tests reference was facetious. If you think BLM was an impressive demonstration, just suggest federal poll tests and see what erupts.
College degrees are about as relevant as eye color for determining suitability for juding.... anything. Literacy? I'm a bit of a "one language" pusher, I think translations are a huge waste of time - but that's probably due to never leaving my one-language culture before age 20. So - what does literacy mean? The other side of that "one language" debate is the diversity of thought and the power that it brings when thinking in various languages, and there is merit to that point - I'm not sure there's enough merit to outweigh the vast inefficiencies of language translation barriers, but... if we are to have literacy tests, are we also to test a person's ability to grasp concepts which aren't expressed clearly, if at all, in their native language? Whether the "language of global trade" ends up being French, English, or Simplified Chinese - are we proposing disenfranchising those who don't speak it? I don't think there are many possible timelines where that would bring any kind of long term stability.
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