ArticleProceedings. Biological sciences2023
When knowledge hurts: humans are willing to receive pain for obtaining non-instrumental information.
Article in Proceedings. Biological sciences, 2023. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 10 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
10 citing papers in PubMed.
- Exerting effort for non-instrumental information under risk.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- Modeling information demand in the framework of probabilistic reasoning.Communications psychology · 2026Article
- Do goldfish like to be informed?Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2025Article
- Counterfactual curiosity in real decisions: The roles of outcome valence and aging.Psychonomic bulletin & review · 2025Article
- Chimpanzees adapt their exploration to key properties of the environment.Nature communications · 2025Article
- The Value of Non-Instrumental Information in Anxiety: Insights from a Resource-Rational Model of Planning.Computational psychiatry (Cambridge, Mass.) · 2025Article
- Temporal context effects on suboptimal choice.Psychonomic bulletin & review · 2024Article
- Exploration-Exploitation Mechanisms in Recurrent Neural Networks and Human Learners in Restless Bandit Problems.Computational brain & behavior · 2024Article
- Non-instrumental information seeking is resistant to acute stress.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- When knowledge hurts: humans are willing to receive pain for obtaining non-instrumental information.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2023Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
6 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Humans and other animals value information that reduces uncertainty or leads to pleasurable anticipation, even if it cannot be used to gain tangible rewards or change outcomes. In exchange, they are willing to incur significant costs, sacrifice rewards or invest effort. We investigated whether human participants were also willing to endure pain-a highly salient and aversive cost-to obtain such information. Forty participants performed a computer-based task. On each trial, they observed a coin flip, with each side associated with different monetary rewards of varying magnitude. Participants could choose to endure a painful stimulus (low, moderate or high pain) to learn the outcome of the coin flip immediately. Importantly, regardless of their choice, winnings were always earned, rendering this information non-instrumental. Results showed that agents were willing to endure pain in exchange for information, with a lower likelihood of doing so as pain levels increased. Both higher average rewards and a larger variance between the two possible rewards independently increased the willingness to accept pain. Our results show that the intrinsic value of escaping uncertainty through non-instrumental information is sufficient to offset pain experiences, suggesting a shared mechanism through which these can be directly compared.
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.