The Impact of the Timing of Advice on Its Utilization

Abstract

There is theoretical and practical interest in characterizing the factors that affect the use of advice when making decisions. Here, we investigated how the timing of advice affects its utilization. We conducted three experiments to compare the integration of advice shown before versus after participants had the chance themselves to evaluate evidence relevant to a decision. We used a perceptual discrimination task in a judge–advisor system, allowing careful control over both the participants' task performance and the task structure across conditions except for the timing of advice. Across all experiments, we found that advice provided after stimulus presentation was agreed with more, and influenced participants' judgments to a greater extent, than advice provided beforehand. In Experiment 1, we observed this tendency to hold when advice varied in accuracy and, in Experiment 2, across variations in task difficulty. Experiment 2 also revealed participants' preference for poststimulus advice when they were given choice over when to receive advice. In Experiment 3, we found greater influence of poststimulus advice to hold both for binary judgments and continuous estimations. These results provide interesting implications for research on the mechanisms of advice integration.