 Confidently at your service: Advisors alter their stated confidence to be helpfulUriel Haran, Asaf Mazar, Mordechai Hurwitz and Simone Moran Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 2022, vol. 171, issue C Abstract: When giving advice, people seek to inform others, but also help them reach a decision. We investigate how the motivation to help affects the confidence people express when advising others. We propose that assuming the role of advisor instigates a desire to help the advisee decide more easily. This desire in turn leads advisors to communicate higher confidence than they actually feel, provided that the environment is sufficiently certain, and thus the risk of misleading the advisee is low. We test our predictions in five studies, using experimental tasks (Studies 1–3), a survey of experienced professionals (Study 4) and an organizational scenario (Study 5). We find that in high-certainty environments, people convey higher confidence when providing advice than private judgments. This effect is driven by the motivation of advisors to facilitate advisees’ decision making: the higher advisors’ desire to help, the more pronounced the effect on their stated confidence. Keywords: Advice; Confidence; Uncertainty; Helpfulness (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:jobhdp:v:171:y:2022:i:c:s0749597822000383 DOI: 10.1016/j.obhdp.2022.104154 Access Statistics for this article Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes is currently edited by John M. Schaubroeck More articles in Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes from Elsevier |
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