Do People Devalue Sources of Threatening Health Feedback Particularly When Its Criteria Are Ambiguous and Its Consequences Enduring?

Abstract

We tested the pre-registered hypotheses that receiving threatening health feedback would lead participants to disparage the health-assessment tool used to generate it and that quality of the assessment would moderate this effect. In Studies 1–3, undergraduate students completed a questionnaire including both unambiguous and ambiguous health-assessment items and were randomly assigned to receive either negative health feedback or no feedback. In Study 4, participants were randomly assigned to a control condition or to one of two experimental conditions that entailed receiving negative feedback about enduring or fleeting consequences of their health behaviors. Across all studies, contrary to our predictions, there were no significant effects of feedback on participants’ ratings of the accuracy of the assessment procedures. These findings have implications for understanding the specific conditions under which people disparage sources of threatening feedback in the domain of health.