One third of people avoid information about their own health.
28.08.2025 16:17
A recent review by the Max Planck Institute for Human Development shows that around one-third of people avoid information about serious illnesses if they fear they might be affected. A key reason is a lack of trust in the healthcare system. The study was published in the journal Annals of Behavioral Medicine.
Early detection of diseases is often key to successful treatment. Nevertheless, too few people go for preventative care, early detection screenings, or check-ups. Why is this? Lack of information or high costs often cannot explain this behavior: In Germany, for example, health insurance companies inform their members about relevant services, and the costs are often covered. So what is holding people back?
Researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin offer a rather surprising answer: Around a third of people don't want to know anything about possible serious illnesses – even if they are potentially affected. "One possibility is that people consciously choose to remain ignorant. This is a phenomenon we already know from other areas of life, and it can have a wide variety of reasons," says Ralph Hertwig, Director of the Adaptive Reality Research Unit at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin and one of the study's co-authors.
Meta-analysis of 92 studies worldwide
The researchers analyzed data from 92 studies with a total of 564,497 participants from 25 countries, including Germany. They wanted to know how widespread the avoidance of medical information is and what reasons people have for doing so. Such prevalence estimates were previously lacking at a global level. Yet they are crucial for shaping health systems, for example, in relation to current efforts to give people more responsibility for their own health.
The analyzed studies include, among others, the diseases Alzheimer's, Huntington's, HIV/AIDS, cancer, and diabetes. The authors defined information avoidance as "any form of behavior aimed at preventing or delaying the acquisition of available but potentially unwanted information." This includes, for example, postponing or not attending doctor's appointments, not undergoing medical tests or ignoring the results, and ignoring educational materials.
The phenomenon of turning a blind eye, especially to serious illnesses, is therefore by no means unusual: Almost a third of the study participants avoid medical information or are likely to do so. The rate was highest for the two incurable neurodegenerative diseases. For Alzheimer's, it was 41 percent, and for Huntington's, 40 percent. For serious but treatable illnesses such as HIV infection or cancer, it dropped to 32 and 29 percent, respectively. At 24 percent, the avoidance behavior was least pronounced, but still worryingly high, for diabetes, which, although chronic, is easily treatable.
Why people hide information
The analysis of the reasons is particularly revealing. The researchers identified a total of 16 key factors that promote avoidance behavior – neither gender nor ethnicity were among them. The strongest predictors were, rather:
- Cognitive overload, because, for example, a cancer diagnosis can be complex and stressful,
- a poor sense of self-efficacy, i.e., the impression of not being able to take control of one's own health,
- the fear of stigmatization, for example through a positive HIV test,
- and finally, a lack of trust in the medical system and therefore less hope of receiving good treatment.
Due to the available data, the researchers were unable to investigate the extent to which avoidance affects the population's health. Further studies are needed for this. Furthermore, they did not make direct comparisons between individual countries. Therefore, the study does not show whether behavior differs in Germany, for example, compared to France or the USA.
What conclusions can be drawn from this for health policy?
Nevertheless, important conclusions can be drawn for future health policy: The results show that avoiding medical information is by no means an unusual human behavior, nor is it necessarily irrational. Rather, the research reveals the strong influence of the social and structural environment. "Our findings suggest that a decline in trust is accompanied by an increase in information avoidance," says Konstantin Offer, lead author of the study and a doctoral candidate in the Adaptive Rationality research group at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development. "Increasing trust in the medical system could therefore lead to greater engagement with medical information," Offer continues. The reasons for avoidance behavior identified in the study thus offer important starting points for policy measures.