The Effect of Judgmental Confidence and Trust in Government on Information Seeking Behaviour

A fair amount of research has been conducted that studies the importance of Information Sufficiency in Information Seeking behaviour, with one of the main frameworks being the Risk Information Seeking and Processing Model. However, these studies only examine the gap between the knowledge someone has and the knowledge someone needs, and not at the effect of the knowledge a person has at that moment. This study aims to determine if the knowledge someone has, referred to as Judgmental Confidence, has an effect on Information Seeking Behaviour. This was done by manipulating the Ease of Retrieval of the participants (N=67) in a survey about climate change, by letting them name either three or eight contributors to climate change. Additionally, this study aimed to determine if people’s Trust in Government influences their information seeking behaviour notwithstanding their judgmental confidence. While the study showed that Ease of retrieval manipulation worked by being able to manipulate the perceived difficulty of naming examples, it showed no significant effect on Judgmental Confidence. Subsequently, there was no effect of Judgmental Confidence on Information Seeking Behaviour, nor does Trust in Government appear to moderate this relation. However, there was a significant association found with the involvement of participants and their Information Seeking behaviour. Limitations of this research are; the relatively low sample size, the situational dependence of Judgmental Confidence which could influence the workings of the Ease of Retrieval manipulation, and possibly an inaccurate type of measurement for this study to measure the Trust in Government. Further research should keep in mind to use the proper amount of participants to achieve an optimal statistical power of the study. Additionally, more research needs to be conducted to determine which type of behaviours can be altered using the Ease of Retrieval manipulation. Lastly, further research is needed to investigate the importance of involvement in information seeking frameworks such as the Risk Information Seeking and Processing model and the possible implementation in such frameworks.