Department of Experimental Psychology, University of Oxford, Oxford, United Kingdom.
PLoS One. 2024 Sep 27;19(9):e0311211. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0311211. eCollection 2024.
Previous research has shown that people are more influenced by advisors who are objectively more accurate, but also by advisors who tend to agree with their own initial opinions. The present experiments extend these ideas to consider people's choices of who they receive advice from-the process of source selection. Across a series of nine experiments, participants were first exposed to advisors who differed in objective accuracy, the likelihood of agreeing with the participants' judgments, or both, and then were given choice over who would advise them across a series of decisions. Participants saw these advisors in the context of perceptual decision and general knowledge tasks, sometimes with feedback provided and sometimes without. We found evidence that people can discern accurate from inaccurate advice even in the absence of feedback, but that without feedback they are biased to select advisors who tend to agree with them. When choosing between advisors who are accurate vs. likely to agree with them, participants overwhelmingly choose accurate advisors when feedback is available, but show wide individual differences in preference when feedback is absent. These findings extend previous studies of advice influence to characterise patterns of advisor choice, with implications for how people select information sources and learn accordingly.
先前的研究表明,人们更容易受到客观上更准确的顾问的影响,也更容易受到那些倾向于同意自己最初意见的顾问的影响。本实验将这些观点扩展到考虑人们选择从谁那里获得建议的过程——即来源选择。在一系列的九个实验中,参与者首先接触到在客观准确性、同意参与者判断的可能性或两者方面存在差异的顾问,然后在一系列决策中对谁来为他们提供建议做出选择。参与者在感知决策和一般知识任务的背景下看到这些顾问,有时有反馈,有时没有。我们发现,即使没有反馈,人们也能够辨别准确的建议和不准确的建议,但如果没有反馈,他们就会倾向于选择那些倾向于同意他们的顾问。当在准确的顾问和可能同意他们的顾问之间做出选择时,当有反馈时,参与者压倒性地选择准确的顾问,但当没有反馈时,他们的偏好存在很大的个体差异。这些发现将先前关于建议影响的研究扩展到了顾问选择模式的描述,这对人们如何选择信息来源和相应地学习有影响。