Preferences for advisor agreement and accuracy

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.