People prefer novices for advice generated from direct experience and experts for advice generated from data synthesis and extrapolation

Abstract

People are often exposed to advice and opinions from both “novices”—people with relatively limited domain experience—and “experts”—people with relatively deeper domain experience. This manuscript explores whether people (i) rely on both groups equally, (ii) consistently favor one over the other, or (iii) rely on novices in certain contexts and experts in others. Across six preregistered studies, we find evidence for the third possibility, and show that the fit between the advice generation process and expertise affect reliance on advice. Specifically, people rely more on novices for advice and opinions from direct lived experience and experts for advice or opinions from data synthesis and extrapolation. This is because people think novices have experiences that are more similar to the ones they will have, while experts do not, but may be better at synthesizing and extrapolating from data. Notably, this distinction is not simply about the domain being advised, but is specific to the advice generating process—in a given domain, people’s reliance on novices and experts can be manipulated by changing their understanding of how the advice or opinion was generated. This pattern of results is generalizable to many domains (e.g., job choice, product ratings). Further, our results build on previous work highlighting from whom people seek advice and opinions, and provide practitioners with insight into when people may be more or less likely to rely on their advice and opinions.