I had no idea the information avoidance was an area of study!

I'm curious to dig into this paper a bit more, because I've been wondering if the same phenomenon relates to:

1) the generally low quality of public discourse on a wide variety of topics -- many people seem to hate discussion based on evidence and would rather "go with their gut" or appeal to some vague notion of "common sense".

2) the popularity of AI -- there seems to be a common sentiment that AI is capable of taking care of the messy, yet important, details of the world around us so that we don't have to. i.e. AI is a information avoidance black box which gives us the liberty of ignoring what's actually in the box.