Seeking Information About a Risky Medicine: Effects of Risk-Taking Tendency and Accountability

Research about risk perception has paid little attention to the fact that people can usually actively seek information about risks with which they are confronted. We hypothesized that (a) risk avoiders would search information more elaborately than would risk takers; (b) accountability should lead participants to search for information more elaborately; (c) risk avoiders would be more susceptible to the accountability manipulation than would risk takers; and (d) risk takers focus more on positive information, and risk avoiders focus more on negative information. Both a person's risk-taking tendency and being held accountable affected information-search depth, but no interactions were found. Nor did we find support for the idea that risk avoiders and risk takers focus on negative and positive information, respectively