Some People Heed Advice Less than Others: Agency (but Not Communion) Predicts Advice Taking

Abstract

Across three studies (total N = 793), we investigated the link between two fundamental dimensions of personality, agency and communion, and advice taking in quantity estimation tasks. We complemented the analyses of the individual studies with meta‐analyses across all three studies in order to gain insight into the robustness of our core results. In line with our expectations, agency was associated with less advice taking, and this effect was mediated by individuals' perceptions of their own competence. Contrary to what we expected, we did not find consistent evidence that communion systematically relates to advice taking. Analyses of judges' initial accuracy further suggested that agentic judges' lower willingness to heed advice was justified by greater initial accuracy as compared with their less agentic peers. Our data, thus, provide evidence of individual differences in advice taking and shed some light on the question which individuals are more inclined to heed advice than others. Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

The role of decision confidence in advice-taking and trust formation.

“…In contrast with other strategies based on classification variability (Weiss & Shanteau, 2003), which require repeated observations, the agreement-in-confidence heuristic enables people to learn an advisor’s accuracy even in one-shot interactions as a basis for weighting their advice in future interactions. This strategy is consistent with various social psychological phenomena, including the “false consensus” effect, naïve realism and social judgment theory’s “latitude of acceptance,” which all indicate a tendency for people to discount disagreeing opinions, underweight advice as a function of distance from one’s own opinion, and consider one’s own opinions as more objective or frequent than others’ (Ecken & Pibernik, 2016; Liberman, Minson, Bryan, & Ross, 2012; Minson, Liberman, & Ross, 2011; Ross, Greene, & House, 1977; Schultze, Gerlach, & Rittich, 2018; Sherif, Sherif, & Nebergall, 1965; Soll & Larrick, 2009; Yaniv, 2004). Importantly, however, our approach differs in suggesting that these phenomena are part of a normatively justified strategy that enables people to discern advisors’ features without the benefit of feedback: When a judge and advisor are independent, their rate of agreement varies as a simple monotonic function of their respective accuracies, so that agreement rate can be used to infer an advisor’s accuracy.…”

Grandiose narcissists and decision making: Impulsive, overconfident, and skeptical of experts–but seldom in doubt

“…The results reported here may also be useful for studies of advice taking. Schultze et al (2017) noted that “We know rather little about individual differences in advice taking (p. 430),” and that it is “important to investigate which individuals are more or less likely to heed advice…and whether it is likely to hurt them (p. 444).” In a complex world, no single decision maker is likely to be sufficiently knowledgeable to make a good decision without the advice of experts. New technologies and social networks make it possible to access expert opinions for industries as diverse as medicine, finance, science and business.…”

Predicting decision-makers’ algorithm use

“…Similarly, the extent to which people have secrets and thus want to conceal negatively perceived personal information is positively associated with human advice taking, as taking advice from others deflects social attention away from oneself (Duan et al, 2022). Characteristics that are negatively associated with advice taking include feelings of power (Tost et al, 2012), narcissism (Kausel et al, 2015), and agency (i.e., the belief in one's competence, Schultze et al, 2018). Future studies could investigate whether these characteristics also relate to the use of algorithmic advice.…”