Predictors of COVID-19 information seeking: Expected information utility and seeking decisions may be particularly associated with uncertainty and related attitudes

The global nature of the COVID-19 pandemic and its major impacts on daily living afforded it a massive share of media attention. Understanding how people navigated this heavily populated informational landscape by choosing to seek particular types of information could help inform and improve scientific communication (e.g., in case of future public health crises). To this end, we examined how expected information utility, affective characteristics, and attitudes predicted COVID-19 information seeking behavior in a sample of 191 midwestern undergraduate students close to the peak of the pandemic (late 2020). Participants completed five rounds of an information seeking task in which they read about a potential gap in their knowledge about COVID-19 and chose whether to read (i.e., “seek”) an excerpt that could fill that information gap. We found that round-wise information-seeking behaviors were best predicted by expected cognitive utility (i.e., the ability to reduce uncertainty), while overall information seeking was positively correlated with COVID-19 preventive behaviors and trust in science, which also correlated with each other. Additionally, exploratory analyses regressing round-wise utility ratings on personality variables revealed that intolerance of uncertainty was associated with higher ratings of all three information utilities. Together, these results suggest that pandemic-related information seeking may have been especially driven by how individuals relate to and manage uncertainty. We discuss these findings in the context of the extant literature on information seeking and utility, and highlight the potential for work in this area to improve potential pandemic-related communication.