Caroline Kjær Børsting - 1st year PhD presentation

Supervisors: Jacob Lund Orquin & Carsten Bergenholtz
Discussants: John Thøgersen & Irene Pollach

Abstract
Information avoidance sometimes leads to biased decision-making. Examples include avoiding climate change information, avoiding health information such as endocrine-disruptive and environmentally-damaging substances in foods, and avoiding information on applicant attributes such as ethnicity, gender and age in hiring decisions.

My PhD project sets out to explore the cognitive mechanisms behind such information avoidance, as well as how harmful instances of information avoidance in areas such as consumer psychology and moral psychology can be reduced. Insights gained from my project could for example inform retailers on how to arrange the visual environment in the supermarket or packaging designers on how to arrange information on product packages

in a way that reinforces consumers to attend to specific information and consequently make healthier choices. Such insights could likewise inform prospective job applicants on how to arrange the appearance of their resume in a way that minimizes potential assessment biases.

In my first paper, I will examine how information avoidance is unfolded in the eyes of the beholder, and which specific attentional mechanism are at play when individuals avoid unwanted information, which will lay the foundations for the future papers in my PhD. Previous research has shown that decision-makers sometimes attend more to self-serving information in consumption decisions (Ehrich & Irwin, 2005; Woolley & Risen, 2018) and moral decisions (Pittarello et al., 2015), but it remains unclear whether this happens merely as a result of increased attention to self-serving information, or instead active suppression of self-hurting information. I test this by means of eye tracking in a lab experiment, where participants are monetarily incentivized to search for or avoid information. Unpacking this relationship between facilitation of self-serving information and suppression of self-hurting information is expected to open up for new strategies for moderating information avoidance.

Everyone is welcome!