Three diverse motives for information sharing

Abstract

Knowledge is distributed over many individuals. Thus, humans are tasked with informing one another for the betterment of all. But as information can alter people’s action, affect and cognition in both positive and negative ways, deciding whether to share information can be a particularly difficult problem. Here, we examine how people integrate potentially conflicting consequences of knowledge, to decide whether to inform others. We show that participants (Exp1: N = 114, Pre-registered replication: N = 102) use their own information-seeking preferences to solve complex information-sharing decisions. In particular, when deciding whether to inform others, participants consider the usefulness of information in directing action, its valence and the receiver’s uncertainty level, and integrate these assessments into a calculation of the value of information that explains information sharing decisions. A cluster analysis revealed that participants were clustered into groups based on the different weights they assign to these three factors. Within individuals, the relative influence of each of these factors was stable across information-seeking and information-sharing decisions. These results suggest that people put themselves in a receiver position to determine whether to inform others and can help predict when people will share information. Individuals consider the usefulness, emotional valence, and prior uncertainty when deciding both when to seek information for themselves and when to share information with others.