When Providing More Health Information Doesn't Lead to Action

Making credible health information available is essential. But availability doesn't guarantee people will seek it, engage with it, or act on it.

Organizations invest heavily in wellness portals, benefits communications, health campaigns, webinars, digital tools, clinician outreach, and other ways of helping people understand their health and available support.

These efforts are reasonable. People need access to credible health information, and organizations need practical ways to communicate prevention, treatment, and support.

But one difficult problem remains:

Many people do not want, seek, or engage with health information.

Information avoidance is common

Medical information avoidance is not unusual.

A recent meta-analysis of 92 studies involving more than 560,000 participants across 25 countries estimated that almost one in three people avoided medical information. Avoidance occurred across topics including diabetes, cancer, HIV, Huntington's disease, and Alzheimer's disease (Offer et al., 2025).

This matters because health engagement strategies often begin with a reasonable assumption: if credible information is available, accessible, and communicated effectively, people who could benefit from it will eventually engage.

That assumption is incomplete.

Health information can be available and still go unread. It can be accurate and still seem irrelevant. It can be well-intended and still create anxiety, threaten an existing belief, or imply an action someone would rather not take.

To understand these responses, it helps to ask a different question:

What purpose might avoiding the information serve?

Sometimes not knowing serves a purpose

Avoiding health information is not necessarily evidence that someone is uninformed or indifferent to their health.

Information itself can have consequences.

Sweeny and colleagues proposed three broad reasons people may be motivated to avoid information (Sweeny et al., 2010): 

1.     It may threaten cherished beliefs about ourselves, other people, or the world;

2.     It may require an action or change we would rather not make; or

3.     Learning the information may produce unpleasant emotions.

Consider what that means for prevention.

Learning about cardiovascular risk might challenge someone's belief that they are healthy. A screening recommendation might create an obligation to schedule an appointment, spend money, change a behavior, or confront an uncertain result. Information about a possible illness can create anxiety before there is anything concrete to treat.

In these situations, not knowing, or not knowing yet, may provide a psychological benefit. Yet it ignores objective health risks.

Information avoidance is therefore not simply the absence of information seeking. It can be a way of managing what knowing something might mean.

Avoidance does not always mean looking away

More recent research also broadens what we mean by avoidance.

Hicks and colleagues describe information avoidance as practices people use to moderate their interactions with information. These include: 

1.     Reducing the amount or flow of information,

2.     Restricting engagement with or control over it, and

3.     Excluding information based on judgments about relevance, quality, or timeliness (Hicks et al., 2025).

Someone might ignore a health email, but they might also stop searching about a health concern, skim rather than read, turn off notifications, postpone learning more, disengage from a particular source, or decide that information simply “doesn't apply to me.”

Some of this is entirely reasonable.

We live in an environment with more information than anyone could possibly process. Filtering and prioritizing information are necessary parts of everyday life.

The health challenge arises when information that could help someone recognize a meaningful risk or take beneficial action is among the information being filtered out.

That changes the question for health communicators.

Rather than asking only:

“How do we get more people to engage with our message?”

we may also need to ask:

“Why might someone prefer not to engage with it?”

More information may sometimes be useful. Understanding why people regulate their exposure may be another place to begin.

References

Hicks, A., McKenzie, P., Bronstein, J., Seiden Hyldegård, J., Ruthven, I., & Widén, G. (2025). Information avoidance: A critical conceptual review. An Annual Review of Information Science and Technology (ARIST) paper. Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology, 76(1), 326–346. https://doi.org/10.1002/asi.24968

Offer, K., Oglanova, N., Oswald, L., & Hertwig, R. (2025). Prevalence and predictors of medical information avoidance: A systematic review and meta-analysis. Annals of Behavioral Medicine, 59(1), kaaf058. https://doi.org/10.1093/abm/kaaf058

Sweeny, K., Melnyk, D., Miller, W., & Shepperd, J. A. (2010). Information Avoidance: Who, What, When, and Why. Review of General Psychology, 14(4), 340–353. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0021288