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ORIGINAL RESEARCH article

Front. Commun.
Sec. Science and Environmental Communication
Volume 9 - 2024 | doi: 10.3389/fcomm.2024.1468968

"Hide Our Heads in the Sand": Environmental Information Avoidance Motives in the United States

Provisionally accepted
Mary Beth Deline Mary Beth Deline 1*Laura Rickard Laura Rickard 2Mary Katreeb Mary Katreeb 1Melissa Adams Melissa Adams 3
  • 1 Illinois State University, Normal, United States
  • 2 University of Maine, Orono, Maine, United States
  • 3 Appalachian State University, Boone, North Carolina, United States

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

    Information avoidance (IA) is a prevalent information behavior that is used by people to understand and act on environmental issues, yet is understudied in the environmental field, leaving us with an incomplete picture of environmental communication processes and outcomes.Compounding this partial knowledge is a lack of research into people's own conceptions of IA.Considering these issues together calls for exploratory research into people's lived experiences of environmental IA. To do so, we focused on a factor that drives behaviors like IA: motives. We investigated environmental IA motives among those living in the US and used the pre-theoretical planned risk information avoidance (PRIA) model to compare and contrast our findings. To undertake this work, we developed a short questionnaire; research company YouGov administered the project. They recruited our participants, who were panel members from their US panel, n = 200. We analyzed open-ended data on participants' IA motives with a framework thematic analysis, identifying seven motives: information credibility and exposure; interpersonal relationship frames; emotional arousal; agency; hazard perceptions; and environmental topics. These findings provide three contributions to environmental IA research. First, three of these motives have been under and/or unexplored in IA studies to date, and we suggest their inclusion in an expanded PRIA model to forward model development. Three other motives indicate boundary conditions associated with environmental issues and IA: scale, timeframe, and referents. Boundary conditions represent how well a theory or model fits into a research context and can sharpen future IA investigations within environmental contexts to increase predictive and explanatory power. Lastly, we also identified the top environmental issues our participants wanted to avoid. Our results provide an initial base to continue developing environmental IA research.

    Keywords: Information avoidance, motives, planned risk information avoidance (PRIA) model, Boundary conditions, Climate Change, waste, Natural resource depletion

    Received: 22 Jul 2024; Accepted: 06 Nov 2024.

    Copyright: © 2024 Deline, Rickard, Katreeb and Adams. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

    * Correspondence: Mary Beth Deline, Illinois State University, Normal, United States

    Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.