The role of adviser confidence during advice-taking

Thesis

People often seek advice during decision-making and people consistently exhibit preference for confidently given advice. Recent work suggests that advisees’ evaluation of adviser confidence is not one-dimensional and considers a variety of factors, such as the level of uncertainty in the decision-making context. The current thesis extends this notion and examines whether advisees make complex inferences about adviser confidence in three experimental chapters. The first line of research investigates whether adviser confidence is evaluated in relation to the advice-taking context and if advisees are sensitive to the subtle cues of competence embedded in adviser confidence. More specifically, advisees’ perception and advice adoption of advice given in context-appropriate linguistic expressions was investigated. Across five experiments, advisees showed limited attention to the congruency between advisers’ linguistic expression and type of uncertainty prevalent in the advice-taking context. The second experimental chapter explored how the discrepancy between external information ambiguity and adviser confidence is processed. Three experiments examined the processing of highly confident advice when external information is variable and the impact of uncertain advice despite clear external information. The results showed that in the former situation, advisees tend to become less confident when an adviser disagrees with their initial answer but increase their confidence when an adviser agrees. Conversely, in the latter scenario, advisees often decreased their confidence in spite of an agreeing advice. This behaviour was most consistently observed when the advisees were considerably overconfident compared to an expert (vs. novice) adviser. Furthermore, advisees showed hints of learning and adopting the advisers’ use of the external information during decision-making. The results suggest that adviser confidence is used flexibly to understand the external information and to evaluate one’s own performance. Advisees’ tendency to learn advisers’ use of the external information from adviser confidence was not the main objective in the second experimental chapter. Therefore, the third line of work further examined this tendency through experimental set-up that resembled cue learning. It was hypothesised that adviser confidence would be perceived as a proxy for performance feedback and help advisees to evaluate the external information. However, two experiments found limited signs of learning from adviser confidence. Overall, the experiments in the current thesis suggests that adviser confidence is not processed in isolation and advisees may be sensitive to subtle factors of adviser confidence under specific circumstances.

Authors: Woo, S

• DOI: 10.5287/ora-9rkpbwpxz
• Type of award: DPhil
• Level of award: Doctoral
• Awarding institution: University of Oxford
• Language: English
• Keywords: confidence; advice taking; uncertainty; decision making
• Subjects: Social psychology