EVENT: Psychology Special Colloquium: Advice taking and advice resistance in groups (Dr. Thomas Schultz-Gerlach)

Title:Advice taking and advice resistance in groups

Abstract

According to conventional wisdom, advice is a simple and effective means to improve the quality of judgments and decisions. Research on advice taking supports this notion, showing that decision-makers’ accuracy improves after taking advice. However, the most robust finding in the literature is advice resistance: decision-makers do not heed advice as much as they should, given its quality, and this tendency to discount advice leads to losses in accuracy. So far, research on advice taking has almost exclusively investigated individual decision-makers, although important decisions in organizations or politics are usually made by groups. Therefore, it remains largely unclear whether or how groups differ from individuals when receiving outside advice. I will present data from three studies comparing advice taking between groups and individuals. Based on a simple prescriptive model that treats the optimal weight of advice as a function of the decision-making group’s size, I develop a descriptive model that aims to predict how strongly groups will weight advice as compared to individuals receiving the same advice. The results suggest that the advice resistance typically found in individuals persists in groups – neither aggravated nor ameliorated – and that groups take into account that “two heads are better than one” when taking advice. Based on these findings, I develop directions for future research specifically aiming at group-specific interventions against advice resistance

SPEAKER BIO:

Thomas Shultz-Gerlach is currently Assistant Professor in the Department of Economic and Social Psychology, Georg-August-University Göttingen. Where he obtained his PhD in 2010, with his thesis: The Overutilization of non-valid advice: Why bad advice is being heeded too much. He will present this colloquia as part of the selection process in recruitment of the Level B position in the School of Psychological Science.