Automatic attitudes and health information avoidance.

Area of Science:

• Health Psychology
• Behavioral Science
• Decision Making

Background:

• Early disease detection is vital for positive health outcomes.
• Individuals sometimes avoid opportunities for early detection, such as health screenings.
• Health information avoidance can stem from both deliberate and automatic, non-deliberative processes.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate if automatic attitudes toward learning health information predict avoidance of risk feedback.
• To examine the role of both controlled (traditional self-report) and automatic (speeded self-report) attitudes in health information avoidance.
• To explore whether prompting contemplation of motives influences health information avoidance.

Main Methods:

• Three studies were conducted involving adults who were given the opportunity to learn their risk for fictitious diseases, melanoma, or heart disease.
• Participants' attitudes toward learning health information were measured using both traditional and speeded (automatic) self-report instruments.
• In one study, participants were prompted to consider their reasons for seeking or avoiding information before making a decision.

Main Results:

• Both self-reported (controlled) and implicitly measured (automatic) attitudes independently predicted avoidance of health risk feedback.
• Automatic attitudes explained unique variance in the decision to avoid health information.
• Prompting participants to contemplate their motives reduced information avoidance by increasing reliance on automatic attitudes.

Conclusions:

• Automatic psychological processes significantly influence the avoidance of health information.
• Interventions aimed at increasing health information seeking may be more effective if they target automatic, subconscious attitudes.
• Understanding and addressing automatic processes can improve uptake of early disease detection opportunities.