Animal Protection and Information Avoidance

Abstract

Social scientists are increasingly interested in information avoidance (IA)—the active decision to refrain from information. However, processing information on animal protection in German livestock systems has not been systematically studied before. We close this gap by conducting a web-based survey in Germany with a focus on abdicating responsibility as a potential predictor of IA. As suggested in psychology, we measure IA with the help of several items to reduce measurement error. In our study, both the “sense of responsibility for animal protection” and the “consciousness of animal protection issues” were negatively associated with IA. This contradicts previous studies (e.g., in medicine, food consumption) in which people avoid information that they expect to trigger negative emotions. Our results help to better understand possible market failures (e.g., asymmetric information, moral hazard) and indicate that providing people with more information may have the potential to further increase legal animal pro-tection standards.