Agony aunts rejoice! We prefer getting advice over just watching what others do

Embargoed until: Publicly released: 2021-10-20 10:01

International

When choosing a dish in a restaurant – do you follow a friend’s recommendation, or look at what others are eating and copy them? Turns out humans value advice more than copying someone else's choice, according to international research, but there is a catch - we have to have trust in the people giving advice. The researchers asked people to play a game in which they had to catch as many virtual fish as they could in one of two lakes. After a few tries, they could watch an expert player or get advice from an expert player. They found that more people followed the direct advice than the observed player, but people suffering from psychiatric conditions where trust is undermined were less likely to follow advice.

Media release

From: The Royal Society

Trusting and learning from others: immediate and long-term effects of learning from observation and advice

Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences

When choosing a dish in a restaurant – are you more likely to follow a friend’s recommendation, or look at what others are eating and copy them? Advice taking is different from observational learning, as it relies on evaluation of the advisors’ intentions and trustworthiness. Using a large cohort (N = 1492) learning experiment, we found that more people followed advice than the observed actions of others, and that that people suffering from psychiatric conditions where trust is undermined were less likely to follow advice. Our findings highlight that actively-provided social information (advice) is treated differently to passively-transmitted social information (eavesdropping). This distinction may lead to better characterization of information sharing in humans and other animals.

Contact: Dr Uri Hertz, University of Haifa, uhertz@is.haifa.ac.il, +972 4 6146239

URL after publication: http://rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org/lookup/doi/10.1098/rspb.2021.1414

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Journal/
conference: Proceedings of the Royal Society B

Research:Paper

Organisation/s: University of Haifa, Israel, University College London, UK

Funder: U.H. was supported by the Israel Science Foundation (1532/ 20) and by the National Institute of Psychobiology in Israel (211-19- 20). N.R. was supported by a Royal Society University Research Fellowship (UF160412) and The Leverhulme Trust.

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