ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2018
People use less information than they think to make up their minds.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2018. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 5 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
5 citing papers in PubMed.
- One's Actions "Aging Poorly": An Integrative Egocentric Framework for Understanding Impression Management Errors and the Challenge of Temporal Impression Management.Personality and social psychology review : an official journal of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, Inc · 2026Review
- Examining the replicability of online experiments selected by a decision market.Nature human behaviour · 2025Article
- The Improvement Default: People Presume Improvement When Lacking Information.Personality & social psychology bulletin · 2025Article
- Estimating the Impact of Words Used by Physicians in Advance Care Planning Discussions: The "Do You Want Everything Done?" Effect.Critical care explorations · 2019Article
- Resolving uncertainty in a social world.Nature human behaviour · 2019Review
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
2 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
A world where information is abundant promises unprecedented opportunities for information exchange. Seven studies suggest these opportunities work better in theory than in practice: People fail to anticipate how quickly minds change, believing that they and others will evaluate more evidence before making up their minds than they and others actually do. From evaluating peers, marriage prospects, and political candidates to evaluating novel foods, goods, and services, people consume far less information than expected before deeming things good or bad. Accordingly, people acquire and share too much information in impression-formation contexts: People overvalue long-term trials, overpay for decision aids, and overwork to impress others, neglecting the speed at which conclusions will form. In today's information age, people may intuitively believe that exchanging ever-more information will foster better-informed opinions and perspectives-but much of this information may be lost on minds long made up.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.