This Norms and Behavioral Change Talk happened on Thursday, May 21st, 2026 at 1:00pm EST with Dr. Silvia Saccardo of Carnegie Mellon University!
Abstract: Attention is a scarce cognitive resource, and directing it toward consequential decisions is a central challenge in today’s information-saturated environments. This challenge is critical in healthcare, where attending to health information can have life-saving implications yet patients are easily overwhelmed by competing messages. Drawing on research suggesting that people direct attention toward issues with higher expected value, we test whether messages designed to raise the perceived value of attending to health information increase patient engagement. Across three pre-registered RCTs in the context of preventive screenings, we find that despite being widely used by healthcare systems and expected by healthcare professionals to work, such messages actually decrease patient engagement with potentially life-saving health information. Analyses of field data and companion online studies suggest that these messages inadvertently direct attention to the possibility of receiving unwanted news, such that interventions aimed at making information harder to ignore may, paradoxically, make it more tempting to avoid.
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Prior to the talk, ECR speaker, Marcelo Woo from the University of Nottingham will also give a short presentation titled 'Heads in the Sand: Theory and Experiment on the Interdependence of Information Avoidance'.
Abstract: Information avoidance is well-documented in individual decision-making: people often forgo useful, freely available information, even when doing so leads to worse outcomes. Yet in many settings —global warming, infectious disease, organizational performance— outcomes are interdependent across individuals. This paper studies information avoidance in interdependent environments where individuals’ decisions to remain ignorant impose negative externalities on others. In such settings, ignorance may be contagious: if individuals are more likely to avoid information when others do so, groups may be trapped in collective ignorance equilibria. We develop a theoretical framework and test its predictions in a novel experiment in which acquiring information affects both own and others’ payoffs. We find substantial heterogeneity. Around 20% of subjects exhibit contagious ignorance, becoming more likely to avoid information when others do the same (“strategic complementarity”), while a similar share displays the opposite pattern (“strategic substitutability”) —acquiring information when others avoid it. Contagious ignorance thus coexists with strategic substitutability in information avoidance, implying that group composition shapes the set of information acquisition equilibria and can determine whether groups converge to widespread awareness or collective ignorance.
Visit his personal website here
