To Read or Not to Read? Motives for Reading Negative COVID-19 News

People were confronted with a barrage of negative news during the COVID-19 crisis. This study investigated how anticipated psychological impact predicted decisions to read personalized and factual COVID-19 news. First, participants chose, based on headlines, whether they wanted to read news articles (or not). Then, all headlines were rated on a set of motivational dimensions. In order to test confirmatory hypotheses, the data were divided into an exploration (n = 398) and validation data set (n = 399). Using multilevel modeling, we found robust support for four preregistered hypotheses: Choice for negative COVID-19 news was positively predicted by (a) personal versus factual news; (b) the anticipated amount of knowledge acquisition; (c) the anticipated relevance to one's own personal situation; and (d) participant's sense of moral duty. Moreover, exploratory findings suggested a positive relationship between headline choice and anticipated compassion, a negative relationship with anticipated inappropriateness and gratitude, and a quadratic relationship with anticipated strength of feelings. These results support the idea that negative content offers informational value, both in terms of understanding negative events and in terms of preparing for these events. Furthermore, engagement with negative content can be motivated by moral values. Public Significance Statement On a daily basis, people are confronted with a wide variety of negative news. This was particularly striking during the COVID-19 pandemic. This article examined what motivates people to engage with potentially distressing news about a worldwide pandemic. We found robust support that anticipated knowledge gain, anticipated relevance to one's own personal situation, and a sense of moral duty positively predicted choices to read negative COVID-19 news. These results are important to understand why people engage with negative content more generally in order to find handholds to stimulate or discourage this behavior.