Information Avoidance: A Strategy to Facilitate Emotional Decision Making

When people want to make an emotional decision, they may avoid information that can make a rational decision stronger. With the aim of investigating information avoidance as a strategy to facilitate emotional decisions and in an experimental design, a call for participation in this study was sent to thirty thousand mobile phone subscribers in Tehran and Karaj and finally 383 people (149 men) with a mean age of 32 years participated in this research. First, participants were faced with rational and emotional choices, and then their information avoidance was measured. Participants were then randomly assigned to three groups and were given the same information they had avoided in three different ways. Finally, participants chose one of the two options and their desire for emotional choice was measured. Z Test and logistic regression analysis showed that most of the participants avoided information, but the same information affected their decisions, the participants who avoided information, chose more emotional choices, and the more the participants desire for emotional choice, the more their information avoidance. So, people avoid information to make emotional decision making easier.