Emily Ho, now at Northwestern University, and her colleagues recently developed a scale to measure people’s relative aversion to potentially unpleasant but also potentially useful information. (You can learn about your own tendency to avoid information here .) The researchers presented 380 participants with various scenarios designed to test their desire to know across three domains (personal health, finances and other people’s perceptions of them), with each scenario presenting the possibility of a favorable or unfavorable outcome for the participant. Scenarios included subjects learning their risk for a particular medical condition, finding out the performance of an investment opportunity they missed and knowing the truth about how well a speech they gave went.