You may have noticed that there are two kinds of
advice-giving situations. Sometimes,
people come to you for advice, because they really don’t know what to do, and
they are asking for your opinion or expertise.
I get a lot of students who come to my office curious about classes that
I would suggest that they take given their interests in Psychology. They don’t know what to take, and they want
suggestions to consider.
Other times, though, people already have an opinion. In those cases, it feels like your advice has
little effect on them unless you happen to agree with the opinion they already
had. I have had students come to me
asking my opinion about research projects they are considering. Often, I feel like they are going to go ahead
with that project regardless of what I suggest.
A number of studies have demonstrated that when people have
an initial opinion, they are likely to stick with that opinion rather than
taking advice, even when it is likely that the advice would lead them to a
better decision.
The real question is how you can get people to pay more
attention to the advice they receive.
That issue was explored in a paper by Ilan Yaniv and Shoham
Choshen-Hillel in a 2012 paper in the Journal
of Experimental Social Psychology.
These authors suggested that people who have their own opinion are more
likely to take into account advice they get when they are asked to take another
person’s perspective rather than their own.
In one study, people were asked to make a series of
estimates like the number of calories in a baked potato. After making their estimate, people were
shown the estimates made by five other people that were drawn randomly from a
sample of estimates made from 100 other individuals. Next, they were asked to make another
estimate based on this advice. Half of
the people were asked what their estimate was given this advice. The other half were told that another person
would be shown the five estimates plus their own and would be asked to guess
the true value.
The group that was asked what their own estimate would be
after seeing the advice kept their initial estimate 50% of the time. The group that was asked to make an estimate
for another person kept their initial estimate only 17% of the time. In addition, the group that made an estimate
for someone else was closer to the true value than those people who estimated
for themselves.
People who were making an estimate for themselves felt more
confident that they were correct initially, and so they gave too much weight to
their own estimate relative to those made by other people.
Of course, just taking someone else’s perspective wasn’t
quite enough. In another study, after
making the estimate for another person, people were asked what their own
estimate was after seeing the advice. In
this case, people still tended to stick with their original estimate.
That means that even after making an estimate for someone
else that used all of the information about equally, people still wanted to
place too much emphasis on their own initial guess.
In order to help yourself take advice, then, you really need
to try to take someone else’s perspective when making a decision. You have to realize that you are going to
have a bias to stick with your own initial opinion. Rather than looking for advice that agrees
with what you already hope to do, try to imaging the situation from the
standpoint of someone else.
