The Underlying Mechanism Of Advice Taking—Tradeoff Between Judge’s Initial Decision And Advisor’s Advice

Individuals tend to seek and accept advice from others rather than making decisions all by themselves. Previous researches mainly focused on the factors that may affect the extent of advice taking, but rarely cared about the underlying mechanism. Recent researches found that confidence and trust may play an important role in advice taking, but they only take the judges’ attitude to initial decision or advisor’ advice into consideration separately, which may result in an incompletely explanation. From the perspective of cognitive process, advice taking may be regard as a process that adjust judge’s initial decision from advisor’s advice, or a process of tradeoff between judges’ initial decision and advisor’s advice. When judges think that their initial decision were better than advisor’s advice, in other words, are more confident of their initial decisions, less trust in advisors’ advice, they tend to discount advice from others. But when judges think that advisors’ advice was better than their initial decision, in other words, are more trust in advisors’ advice, less confident of their initial decisions, they tend to accept advices from others. The process of judge’s tradeoff between confidence in initial decision and trust in advice may be the underlying mechanism of advice taking.Based on previous researches, present research proposed the tradeoff mechanism of advice taking, and tried to prove it through three researches. Experiment 1 explored the effect of judge’s expertise on advice taking, Experiment 2 focused on the effect of advisor’s expertise on advice taking, Experiment 3 tried to find the effect of task difficulty on advice taking. All experiments asked participants to estimate the amount of coins in a glass, adopt the Judge-Advisor System(JAS) paradigm, means that firstly participants estimated the number of coins alone, and then estimate again with the help of an advisor. The dependent variable was WOA(weight of advice)and we adopt an adapted version of questionnaire from other researches to measure the participants’ confidence in their initial estimation and trust in advisor’s advice.Results showed that:(1) the weight of advice varied as a function of judge’s expertise, which was measured in terms of accuracy of their initial estimation. More knowledgeable individuals discounted the advice more, the tradeoff index(trust minus confidence) meditated the effect of judge’s expertise on advice taking, but neither confidence nor trust index could;(2) participants tended to accept the advice from expertise rather than novice, both the tradeoff index and trust index alone meditated the effect of expertise on advice taking, and the trust index’s meditation effect was a little bigger, which may result from that the manipulation of advisor’s expertise was too successful;(3) individuals accepted more advice in difficult task than individuals in simple task, and tradeoff index meditated the effect of task difficulty on advice taking, but confidence and trust cannot.Based on these results, present research concludes that:(1) More knowledgeable individuals discounted the advice more; and individuals tended to accept advice from expertise rather than novice, in difficult task rather than simple one;(2) Although confidence and trust may play a meditation role in the process of advice taking sometimes, but the tradeoff explanation is a better one.