Seeking information about outcomes affecting other people shows a preference for good news

Information about other people is vital for understanding the world, social relationships, and providing help. With so much information available, we must constantly choose whether to seek or avoid it. These choices depend on our preferences for particular information and shape the boundaries of our social knowledge. In two experiments, we examined how people decide between seeking or avoiding information about outcomes affecting others and whether these choices show a preference for good news, shown previously for information about oneself. Participants decided whether to reveal financial outcomes, a potential gain or potential loss each with a known probability (10% to 90%), for themselves or another person. Participants in Experiment 1 (n=205) could ‘opt-in’ to reveal the outcome or do nothing to avoid knowing it. In Experiment 2 (n=56), an action was required for either option, making seeking and avoiding information equally active. Both experiments demonstrated a clear preference to seek positive over negative information about others. This preference increased with the likelihood of the outcome and crucially, was the same as the preference for good news about outcomes affecting oneself. Individual differences revealed a general tendency to seek or avoid information across domains, but social information-seeking also linked to empathic concern and charitable giving. Together, these findings show the information we seek about others depends on whether it is expected to be positive or negative as well as individual factors. Advancing our understanding of such preferences has vital implications for research across the social sciences, as well as applied importance.