Strategic Ignorance and Perceived Control

Anca Balietti, Angelika Budjan, Tillmann Eymess and Alice Solda

No 735, Working Papers from University of Heidelberg, Department of Economics

Abstract: Information can trigger unpleasant emotions. As a result, individuals might be tempted to strategically ignore it. We experimentally investigate whether increasing perceived control can mitigate strategic ignorance. Participants from India were presented with a choice to receive information about the health risk associated with air pollution and were later asked to recall it. Perceived control leads to a substantial improvement in information recall. We find that optimists react most to perceived control, both with a reduction in information avoidance and an increase in information recall. This latter result is supported by a US sample. A theoretical framework rationalizes our findings.

Keywords: information avoidance; information recall; perceived control; motivated cognition; air pollution; Luftverschmutzung (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023-09-22
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-env, nep-exp, nep-ger and nep-hea
Note: This paper is part of http://archiv.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/volltextserver/view/schriftenreihen/sr-3.html
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:bsz:16-heidok-338419 Frontdoor page on HeiDOK (text/html)
https://archiv.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/volltextserver ... t_al._2023_dp735.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Strategic Ignorance and Perceived Control (2023)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:awi:wpaper:0735

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from University of Heidelberg, Department of Economics Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Gabi Rauscher ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ).