Information seeking and plan elaboration: What do you need to know to know what to do?

Participants sought target and situation information either before or after devising plans to reach one of two social goals. Seeking information before planning produced more elaborate plans, as measured by their length, for one goal. For both goals, quantity and diversity of information sought and plan length were positively correlated but only for those who sought information before planning. Plan elaboration also was influenced by the type of information sought. The number of contingent actions included in plans was influenced neither by timing of information seeking nor by the amount of information sought; however, diversity of information seeking was positively related to the number of contingencies generated for one of the two goals. Findings are discussed in terms of theoretical notions derived from case‐based planning theory, and a tentative, two‐stage model of plan specification is proposed.