Surviving Bad News: Health Information Without Treatment Options

When there is no treatment available for a life-threatening disease, providing personal health information could lead to despair or fatalistic behaviors resulting in negative health outcomes. We document this possibility utilizing an experiment in Malawi that randomized incentives to learn HIV testing results in a context where anti-retroviral treatment was not yet available. Six years after the experiment, among HIV+s, those who learned their status were 23 percentage points less likely to survive than those who did not, with effects persisting after 15 years. Receiving an HIV+ diagnosis resulted in riskier health behaviors, greater anxiety, and higher discount rates.