Raw Data for: Don't Tell Me What to Think: How Perceived and Suggested Risk Affect Selective Exposure to Health Information

With this study design we plan to explore the underlying motivation for selective exposure of health information in threatening vs. non-threatening situations. We explicitly distinguish between two distinct motivations that are relevant to the context in question. First, the general motivation to defend one’s own opinion and attitudes by approaching confirming information and avoiding disconfirming information (which we denote as ‘self-confirming motivation’; see Hart et al., 2009, for a meta-analysis); and second, the more specific motivation to defend one’s self-image with regard to health and physical integrity (self-bolstering and self-defending motivation; Knobloch-Westerwick et al., 2013). By inducing a threat through a experimentally variation of risk feedback, our aim is to disentangle the effect of these two basic defense motivations on selective exposure and the potential downgrade of opposing information. Therefore, we will apply a 2x2 design (experimental factor: risk feedback yes/no, and quasi-experimental factor: perceived risk high/low; see Figure 1) and analyze the impact of the four different conditions on the degree of bias in seeking for health information as well as the quality ratings of the given different types of information. Furthermore, we will consider relevant competence and personality variables as moderators in exploratory analyses.

Selective exposure to online health information can be ascribed to two related defense motives: the motivation to confirm one’s subjective perceptions, and the motivation to protect relevant parts of the self-image, such as physical integrity. Our aim was to identify how these motives come into effect in the context of a health threat (risk of developing a heart disease). In a preregistered online study with N = 763 individuals, we analyzed the impact of perceived and suggested risk on the degree of bias in selecting risk-related information on an alleged Google search result page. Applying a 2x2 design with the experimental factor ‘risk feedback’ and the quasi-experimental factor ‘perceived risk’, we formulated six hypotheses. First, we expected a main effect of perceived risk on selective exposure to information suggesting no risk and second, we hypothesized a main effect of perceived risk on mean quality rating of information suggesting a risk. Third, we proposed a main effect of risk feedback on selective exposure to information which suggests no risk and fourth, we proposed a main effect of risk feedback on mean quality rating of information suggesting a risk. Fifth, we expected an interaction effect between perceived and suggested risk in and sixth, we proposed an interaction effect between perceived and suggested risk in different forms for each of the four conditions on quality ratings. Only the third hypothesis was confirmed: Receiving information which suggested a health risk increased the tendency to select information denying the risk. Additional exploratory analyses revealed a moderator effect of health information literacy on the relationship between risk feedback and selective exposure. In sum, our results underline the crucial role of defense motives in the context of a suggested health threat.