Information Seeking and the Expected Utility of Information About COVID-19 Can Be Associated with Uncertainty and Related Attitudes

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 reduced uncertainty). When collapsed across rounds, information seeking was positively correlated with COVID-19 preventive behaviors and trust in science, which also correlated with each other. Additionally, exploratory analyses regressing round-wise utility ratings on personality variables revealed that intolerance of uncertainty was associated with higher ratings of all three information utilities. Together, these results suggest that pandemic-related information seeking may have been especially driven by how individuals relate to and manage uncertainty. We discuss how these findings relate to extant literature on information utility and seeking behaviors and highlight the potential for work in this area to improve scientific communication.