The Fool from the Dance of Death, Hieronymus Hess, c1845. (Getty)Should a deathly-thin figure offer you the scoop, would you like to know when you’ll die?
What if the bearer of bad news was less a medieval embodiment of death and more a wrist gadget that analyses your body’s endothelial cells, or futuristic body monitoring implants that track your mortal descent in real time? Would you dare scroll down past the spoiler alert and read the date of your inevitable demise?
You might not, and it’s all because of a little something called information aversion.
You’ve encountered it before. Hell, you’ve experienced it before. Uncertainty can be maddening, but it still offers the comfort of ambiguity. If we don’t actually go to the doctor, we won’t have to hear any of dreaded words of doom. If we don’t actually catch our loved ones, friends or coworkers in the act, then we can still cling to denial. Cancer? Betrayal? Bankruptcy? La la la, I can’t hear you.
It’s human nature, sure, but it’s also a hurdle to public health. How do doctors skirt the defenses of information aversion in order to better treat patients and deliver the ill tidings that come with their profession?
Fear of a White Coat
A 2014 study from Claremont Graduate University dived into just this question by studying student reactions to STD tests. Here’s how it broke down:
- Students in the study were told that blood would be drawn and could be tested for two strains of herpes simplex virus: HSV1, which causes cold sores, and HSV2, which affects the genitals.
- Students in the study were given a full graphic breakdown of what HSV1 and HSV2 does to you.
- Students were then given the choice of having their blood tested for herpes, with the results to be given in full confidentiality.
- They were given the option of turning down the HSV1 test and could also turn down the HSV2 test, but only if they paid a $10 fee.
The results?
Five percent of the students chose to dodge the HSV1 test, while three times as many paid the fee to watch their blood dribble down a sink drain instead of finding out if HSV2 was in their system. The most common excuse was that they didn’t want to stress themselves out with the answer. Yes, better to maybe have a sexually transmitted disease and not know it than to have a definitive answer.
To be clear: they paid to avoid the information, not the needle. Their blood was drawn either way.
Don’t Fear the Reaper
What does this tell us about information aversion? Well, according to the researchers, frightening implications can scare people into the comforting arms of ignorance. So perhaps scare tactics, particularly about health matters, are a poor strategy. Likewise, when testing like this is an anomaly, it’s a dread figure on the horizon. You fear it with each step of your approach. Make tests like this more routine and you take some of the fear out of it. They become mere tests, not the test.
How will this play out in a future of real-time health monitoring is upon us? Will grim details of disease still make us silence our implants and flee into the comforting arms of ignorance?
Time will tell, and the reaper will collect.
About the author: Robert Lamb is a senior writer and podcaster at HowStuffWorks, where he co-hosts Stuff to Blow Your Mind with Julie Douglas. He has a love for monsters, an aversion to slugs and a hankering for electronic music.
