Information seeking and the expected utility of information about COVID-19 can be associated with uncertainty and related attitudes.

ABSTRACT: Understanding how people decide when to seek out information can offer important insights into best practices for scientific communication, which may be critical in the face of global challenges like the COVID-19 pandemic. We examined how expected information utility, affective characteristics, and attitudes predicted COVID-19 information seeking behavior in a sample of 191 midwestern undergraduate students in late 2020. Participants completed five rounds of an information seeking task in which they read about a potential gap in their knowledge about COVID-19 and chose whether to read an excerpt that could fill that information gap. We found that information seeking in a given round (i.e. "round-wise information seeking") was best predicted by expected cognitive utility (i.e., expected red

SUBMITTER: Torunsky NT 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC11840097 | biostudies-literature | 2025 Feb

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature