Judgment and Decision-Making Process: Advice Giving and Taking

Judge–Advisor System Terminology

Judge–advisor system research has traditionally employed the term judge to refer to the decision maker—that is, the recipient of advice. The advisor is, as the term implies, the provider of advice. The JAS, then, refers to an entity composed of the judge and one or more advisors who engage in a decision-making task.

In JAS research, advice given to decision makers often takes the form of a recommendation for a specific course of action (e.g., “you should do X,” or “you should choose the first option”). However, there is growing evidence that advising interactions contain more than the provision of a specific recommendation. In fact, advice also includes behaviors such as recommending the decision maker not to choose one of the current alternatives, providing new information about one or more of the decision maker's current alternatives, or suggesting a new alternative that the decision maker had not initially thought about. In addition, advice can take the form of helping decision makers structure and organize the decision-making process. For example, advisors can suggest making a list of pros and cons for each potential alternative. Finally, advisors can provide socioemotional support, such as when they empathize with the decision maker.

Although the term advice refers to a collection of behaviors, most of the JAS research conduced to date involves the exchange of advice defined as a recommendation for a specific course of action. This research can be divided into two broad categories: advice taking and advice giving. Whereas the latter stream of research takes the perspective of the advisor, the former takes the perspective of the decision maker (or the judge).

Advice Taking

One of the main questions asked by researchers interested in advice taking is what happens when decision makers receive another person's recommendation. A central finding of this research is that of egocentric advice discounting. Although advice generally helps decision-making accuracy, decision makers' postadvice opinion is influenced to a greater extent by their own opinions than by their advisors' recommendations. In other words, decision makers tend to disregard advisors' recommendations relative to their own preadvice opinions. Egocentric advice [Page 428]discounting is a robust phenomenon. However, some conditions diminish decision makers' propensities to overweight their opinions relative to the advisor's recommendation (although some discounting typically still occurs).

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