The advice less taken: The consequences of receiving unexpected advice

Abstract

Although new information technologies and social networks make a wide variety of opinions and advice easily accessible, one can never be sure to get support on a focal judgment task. Nevertheless, participants in traditional advice taking studies are by default informed in advance about the opportunity to revise their judgment in the light of advice. The expectation of advice, however, may affect the weight assigned to it. The present research therefore investigates whether the advice taking process depends on the expectation of advice in the judge-advisor system (JAS). Five preregistered experiments (total N = 2019) compared low and high levels of advice expectation. While there was no evidence for expectation effects in three experiments with block-wise structure, we obtained support for a positive influence of advice expectation on advice weighting in two experiments implementing sequential advice taking. The paradigmatic disclosure of the full procedure to participants thus constitutes an important boundary condition for the ecological study of advice taking behavior. The results suggest that the conventional JAS procedure fails to capture a class of judgment processes where advice is unexpected and therefore weighted less.

Mixed-Effects Regression Weights for Advice Taking and Related Phenomena of Information Sampling and Utilization

“…Second, advice and initial judgments are non-orthogonal. For instance, multiple regression with partial effects would be more appropriate than traditional analysis approaches for experimentally manipulated advice distance (e.g., Rebholz & Hütter, 2022;Schultze et al, 2015). Moreover, non-orthogonality is highly ecological as judges often anchor advisors by including their own judgments in their requests for advice (Reif et al, 2022).…”

Mixed‐effects regression weights for advice taking and related phenomena of information sampling and utilization

“…Compared to the inter‐individual differences in advice weighting $$$ {\hat{\tau}}_{A_k,S} $$$, there was notably less variability for different items as measured by $$$ {\hat{\tau}}_{A_k,T} $$$. Also in comparison to other judgment tasks, such as product carbon footprint or quantity estimation (Rebholz & Hütter, 2022; see also Rebholz, 2023, Chapter 3, for MER‐WOAs), the differences between items were rather negligible. In contrast to the item‐wise random effects, we indeed found significant differences between some of the participant‐wise random effects.…”

“…Second, advice and initial judgments are non‐orthogonal. For instance, multiple regression with partial effects would be more appropriate than traditional analysis approaches for experimentally manipulated advice distance (e.g., Schultze et al, 2015; Rebholz & Hütter, 2022). Moreover, non‐orthogonality is highly ecological as judges often anchor advisors by including their own judgments in their requests for advice (Reif et al, 2022).…”

Consulting Multiple Advisors: When It Hurts and When It Does Not Hurt the Advisor–Advisee Relationship?

“…Expectations have also been shown to influence advisees. In particular, Rebholz and Hütter (2022) found that advisees weigh less a piece of advice when it is not expected.…”