Let Me Give You Some Advice

Faced with a mission-critical decision, who would you turn to for advice? Someone you had great confidence in, surely. But several lines of research show that our instincts about where to turn for counsel are often flawed. My research looks at biases that affect how people use advice, including why they often blindly follow recommendations from people who—as far as they know—are as knowledgeable (or ignorant) as they are. In studies I conducted with Don Moore of Carnegie Mellon University, for example, I found that people tend to overvalue advice when the problem they’re addressing is hard and to undervalue it when the problem is easy. In our experiments, subjects were asked to guess the weight of people in various pictures, some of which were in focus (making guessing easier) and some of which were blurred (complicating the guesswork). For each picture, subjects guessed twice: the first time without advice and the second time with input from another, randomly chosen participant. When the pictures were in focus, we found, subjects tended to discount the advice; apparently, they were confident in their ability to guess correctly. When the pictures were blurry, subjects leaned heavily on the advice of others and seemed less sure about their initial opinion. Because they misjudged the value of the advice they received—consistently overvaluing or undervaluing it depending on the difficulty of the problem—our subjects made suboptimal guesses overall. They would have done better if they’d considered the advice equally, and to a moderate degree, on both hard and easy tasks. Another advice-related bias I’ve found compels people to overvalue advice that they pay for. In one study I conducted, subjects answered different sets of questions about American history. Before answering some of the questions, they could get advice on the correct answer from another subject whom they knew was no more expert than they were. In one version of the experiment, people could get advice for free, while in another version, they paid for it. When they paid for advice, people tended to give it more credence than it warranted—driven, I suspect, by a combination of sunk-cost bias and the nearly instinctual belief that cost and quality are linked. Obviously, giving and receiving advice in a business environment is vastly more complex than what we modeled in these experiments. Among other things, people seeking advice in a business setting try to gauge the quality of the information they’re receiving based in part on how reliable the source has been in the past. And it’s a rare manager who makes decisions without receiving advice from colleagues, superiors, or external experts—advice that often has a strong influence on final decisions. Knowing that the complexity of the problems you face may affect how you weigh advice suggests that you should second-guess your reflexive reactions to it. Conversely, when you think the solution to a problem is simple, and you find yourself waving off advice givers, think again. You may know a lot about the problem, but that doesn’t mean you won’t benefit from the opinions of others who know a lot, too. And when you’re struggling with a challenging problem and you’re tempted by advice that’s at odds with your own impulses, ask yourself whether you’re overvaluing that counsel. You may not be well-informed about the problem, but beware of being too willing to listen to others who are no better informed than you are. Finally, before acting on those premium-priced recommendations from your consultancy, ask what you’d do if you had gotten the same advice for free.

Let Me Give You Some Advice

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