Attention to Missing Information: The Effect of Novel Disclosure Methods

People and organizations frequently withhold information that, if made public, might impact their cause. Rational people–should– view withheld information as a sign that another party may have ‘something to hide.’ When people interpret language, they often draw elaborate, adverse conclusions from the withholding of information. Behavioral and experimental economic studies, however, frequently indicate that people are not that sensitive to withheld information, as if they are giving the ‘benefit of the doubt’ regarding missing information. It is worth noting that these results are usually the result of participants reviewing abstract tabular representations of information. It is possible that people might treat the withholding of information very differently in a conversational interaction. In three experiments, we show that people are substantially more sensitive to, and suspicious of, withheld information in a conversational context. Bringing together behavioral economics and experimental pragmatics, this work suggests that naturalist conversational interactions, whether auditory or written, when compared to abstract presentations of information, may best engage important aspects of human reasoning. Decision makers often must make choices based on information selected by other parties with different interests. Buying a car with only partial access to its history, letting your teen go to a party based only on the information she provides, and hiring job applicants using the information that they choose to disclose are a few examples of a situation that is pervasive. Standard economic theory predicts that people will recognize when information is being withheld and respond to that awareness rationally. When rational economic agents interact in markets, economic theory predicts a phenomenon known as ‘unraveling’ whereby all information is disclosed, and people infer any (exceptional) failures to do so as indicating that the withheld information is as adverse as it could be (Grossman & Hart, 1980; Milgrom, 1981).