Pushing away from representative advice: Advice taking, anchoring, and adjustment

• We explore how the sequence of advice impacts how much advice is used.
• We call those who receive advice before forming their own opinion “dependent”.
• Dependent advisees adjusted away from median advice (“push away effect”).
• Our studies also found a push-away effect using a classic anchoring paradigm.
• We discuss when push-away effects occur in advice taking and anchoring studies.

Five studies compare the effects of forming an independent judgment prior to receiving advice with the effects of receiving advice before forming one’s own opinion. We call these the independent-then-revise sequence and the dependent sequence, respectively. We found that dependent participants adjusted away from advice, leading to fewer estimates close to the advice compared to independent-then-revise participants (Studies 1–5). This “push-away” effect was mediated by confidence in the advice (Study 2), with dependent participants more likely to evaluate advice unfavorably and to search for additional cues than independent-then-revise participants (Study 3). Study 4 tested accuracy under different advice sequences. Study 5 found that classic anchoring paradigms also show the push-away effect for median advice. Overall, the research shows that people adjust from representative (median) advice. The paper concludes by discussing when push-away effects occur in advice taking and anchoring studies and the value of independent distributions for observing these effects.