08:30 - 10:00
Mon-A7-Talk I-
Mon-Talk I-
Room: A7
Chair/s:
Maren Mayer
When making decisions, individuals often receive advice from others and incorporate this advice into their own judgments and decisions-under certain conditions leading to increases in decision quality and confidence. Beyond the typical paradigm examining advice-based decisions, several research avenues emerged in recent years that rely on advice taking and extend the typical paradigm to various different tasks and contexts. In this symposium, we thus introduce several novel directions for advice taking and related research. The first contribution provides an overview of typical paradigms and findings of empirical studies on advice-based decisions conducted over the last 15 years in behavioral and organizational research. The second contribution describes a newly developed (largely) culture-fair estimation task that solely requires secondary school level as a basis for conducting between-culture comparisons of advice taking in Chinese and German students. The third talk will present an application of the advice taking paradigm to investigate social influence in moral judgments at the example of the asymmetric moral conformity effect. The fourth contribution addresses sequential collaboration, a process relying on consecutively improving contributions made by others in which previous contributions can be viewed as advice for later contributors. Some of the previous findings will be reassessed to complement the presentation of a novel statistical modeling approach for process-consistent analysis of judgment formation in part five. The final contribution addresses how people update their beliefs about the validity of effects when being confronted with various scientific evidence, which can be viewed as a form of advice.
Using a (mostly) culture-fair paradigm to compare advice taking between cultures
Mon-A7-Talk I-02
Presented by: Thomas Schultze
Thomas Schultze
Queen's University Belfast
Most studies on advice taking use the judge-advisor system (JAS), in which one participant makes an initial judgment, then receives advice from another person, and subsequently makes a final judgment. Research using the JAS has shown that decision-makers egocentrically discount advice, that is, they overweight their own initial judgments. While advice taking has been studied in different countries, there is still a lack of cross-cultural comparisons. The main problem is that the judgment tasks used so far are not culture fair because they require general knowledge that may differ depending on where participants grew up. For example, European participants may find it easy to estimate distances between European cities but may have difficulties estimating the caloric content of Manti dumplings. Since task difficulty is a strong predictor of advice taking, differences in task difficulty due to different knowledge backgrounds produce a confound in cross-cultural comparisons. Here, we aimed to remedy this problem by developing a (largely) culture fair estimation task that only requires secondary school level mathematics knowledge. In this task, participants estimate annual rainfall based on a certain number of measurements. They receive the estimate of a simulated colleague as advice along with information about the number of measurement available to that colleague. Using this task, we compared advice taking between German and Chinese university students. Our results show evidence of egocentric advice discounting in both groups, but the effect is more pronounced in the German sample.
Keywords: judgment and decision-making, advice taking, cross-cultural