The Roles of Information Seeking and Information Evaluation for Decision-Making Behaviors

This study examines the roles of information seeking and information evaluation for decision-making behaviors, 25 undergraduate students (7 males and 18 females, M-age = 18.60, SDage = 1.12) participated in an experiment about information choices on three different types of tasks-academic, affective, and life event. They sought and evaluated information from two major sources-via the Internet or human interactions. The results showed that there was a full mediation effect of information evaluation on the relationship between preference of information seeking and decision-making of information choices for academic and life event-related tasks. Information evaluation had a partial mediation effect for affective task. It showed that evaluation of information by participants played an important role in decision-making behaviors, depending on the contents and natures of the tasks. The effect was relatively high in academic and life event-related tasks, and relatively weak in affective task.