Zaleskiewicz Tomasz, Gasiorowska Agata, Stasiuk Katarzyna, Maksymiuk Renata, Bar-Tal Yoram
Faculty in Wroclaw, SWPS University of Social Sciences and Humanities Wroclaw, Poland.
Institute of Psychology, Maria Curie-Sklodowska University Lublin, Poland.
Front Psychol. 2016 Sep 27;7:1476. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2016.01476. eCollection 2016.
The goal of this experimental project was to investigate lay peoples' perceptions of epistemic authority (EA) in the field of finance. EA is defined as the extent to which a source of information is treated as evidence for judgments independently of its objective expertise and based on subjective beliefs. Previous research suggested that EA evaluations are biased and that lay people tend to ascribe higher EA to experts who advise action (in the case of medical experts) or confirm clients' expectations (in the case of politicians). However, there has been no research into biases in lay evaluations of financial experts and this project is aimed to fill this gap. Experiment 1 showed that lay people tended to ascribe greater authority to financial consultants who gave more active advice to clients considering taking out a mortgage. Experiment 2 confirmed the action advice effect found in Experiment 1. However, the outcomes of Experiments 2 and - particularly - 3 suggested that this bias might also be due to clients' desire to confirm their own opinions. Experiment 2 showed that the action advice effect was moderated by clients' own opinions on taking loans. Lay people ascribed the greatest EA to the advisor in the scenario in which he advised taking action and where this coincided with the client's positive opinion on the advisability of taking out a loan. In Experiment 3 only participants with a positive opinion on the financial product ascribed greater authority to experts who recommended it; participants whose opinion was negative tended to rate consultants who advised rejecting the product more highly. To conclude, these three experiments revealed that lay people ascribe higher EA to financial consultants who advise action rather than maintenance of the , but this effect is limited by confirmation bias: when the client's opinion is salient, greater authority is ascribed to experts whose advice confirms it. In this sense, results presented in the present paper suggest that the action advice effect might be also interpreted as a specific manifestation of confirmation bias.
这个实验项目的目标是调查外行人对金融领域认知权威（EA）的看法。认知权威被定义为一个信息来源在独立于其客观专业知识的情况下，基于主观信念被视为判断依据的程度。先前的研究表明，认知权威评估存在偏差，外行人往往会将更高的认知权威赋予那些建议采取行动的专家（如医学专家的情况）或证实客户期望的专家（如政治家的情况）。然而，目前还没有关于外行人对金融专家评估偏差的研究，而这个项目旨在填补这一空白。实验1表明，外行人倾向于赋予那些给考虑申请抵押贷款的客户提供更积极建议的金融顾问更大的权威。实验2证实了实验1中发现的行动建议效应。然而，实验2和特别是实验3的结果表明，这种偏差也可能是由于客户想要证实自己观点的愿望。实验2表明，行动建议效应受到客户自身对贷款看法的调节。在外行人建议采取行动且这与客户对申请贷款可取性的积极看法一致的情景中，外行人赋予顾问最大的认知权威。在实验3中，只有对金融产品持积极看法的参与者才会赋予推荐该产品的专家更大的权威；持负面看法的参与者往往会给建议拒绝该产品的顾问更高的评价。总之，这三个实验表明，外行人会赋予建议采取行动而非维持现状的金融顾问更高的认知权威，但这种效应受到证实偏差的限制：当客户的观点很突出时，会赋予其建议证实该观点的专家更大的权威。从这个意义上说，本文呈现的结果表明，行动建议效应也可能被解释为证实偏差的一种具体表现。
