Information Avoidance and Image Concerns

A rich literature finds that individuals avoid information, even information that is instrumental to their choices. A common hypothesis posits that individuals strategically avoid information to hold particular beliefs or to take certain actions—such as behaving selfishly—with lower image costs. Building off of the classic “moral wiggle room” design, this paper provides the first direct test of whether individuals avoid information because of image concerns. We do so by introducing a control condition that makes minimal changes to eliminate the role of image concerns while keeping other key features of the decision environment unchanged. We analyze data from 4,626 experimental subjects. We find that image concerns play a role in driving information avoidance, but a role that is substantially smaller—less than half of the magnitude—than the common approach in the literature would suggest.