Vast amounts of highly personalized information are now available to individuals. A vital research challenge is to establish how people decide what they want to know. Here, we show that information-seeking is driven by three diverse motives. We quantify these motives and find that people can be characterized into distinct “information-seeking types” according to the motive that dominates their information-seeking behaviour. This categorization is stable over time and diagnostic of mental health. Specifically, we show that people integrate their assessment of how information will influence their action, affect and cognition into a calculation of the value of information that leads to information-seeking or avoidance. While some people predominantly seek information according to its usefulness in selecting action, others predominantly seek information according to its ability to regulate their affective state, while others predominantly seek information about concepts they think of frequently. Using a longitudinal approach, we show that the relative influence of these three motives on information-seeking within an individual remains stable across time and is related to mental health. The latter finding is of special importance as it suggests that detection of mental health problems may be facilitated by using measured markers of real-world information-seeking.

Link to Zoom Webinar: https://mit.zoom.us/j/96044468962