The Influence Of Advice Cost And Adviser’s Expertise On Advice Taking

Advice taking is the process that the judge adopts others’ advice in the research of decision-making. When adopts others’ advice, the judge often take many factors into account, thus under different conditions the degree of advice taking is different.Previous studies demonstrated that the higher advice cost is, the higher degree of advice taking, and the more professional adviser is, the more advice will be adopted. However, we often confront the situations that advice cost and adviser’s expertise contradictory( i.e. novice charge high while expert charge low), such as in the field of psychological counseling, financial counseling and medical counseling, etc. How should we adopt others’ advice in this situation? This research investigated the influence of advice cost and adviser’s expertise on advice taking in the Judge-Advisor System paradigm which was widely used in advice taking domain.Experiment 1 employed a 2(expertise: expert, novice) × 2(advice cost: high, low) within-subjects design. Based on the experiment 1, experiment 2 fixed the charge of expert and constantly increase the advice cost of novice’s. 41 undergraduates took part in experiment 1, 125 undergraduates took part in experiment 2. The decision making task that employed in both experiments are the same: participants were asked to estimate the number of coins in the glass. The dependent variable is the degree of advice taking, measured by the WOA formula.The results showed that:(1) The main effect of the influence of advice cost and adviser’s expertise on advice taking are both significant. The degree of advice taking to the low-cost advice is significantly less than that to the high-cost advice. And the degree of advice taking from the expert is significantly higher than that from the novice. Moreover, there is no significant difference between the degree of advice taking when novice’s high advice cost and that of expert’s low advice cost.(2) When the novice’s advice cost is slightly more than the expert’s advice cost, the degree of advice-taking to the expert is still higher than the novice.But when the novice’s advice cost is high enough, the judge will become irrational and tend to become frequently adopt the novice’s advice more.