Advisors want their advice to be used – but not too much: Comparing advisor expectations and advisee behavior in advice weighting

Much advice-taking research investigates whether advice weighting accords to normative principles. The present research complements this normative perspective with an interpersonal one, arguing that advisees should also attend to how much their advisors expect them to weight advice. Across three experiments, we find that advisors’ expectations of advice weighting are often congruent with advisees’ actual advice weighting, but moderators can cause expected and actual weighting to diverge (Experiments 1 & 2). Increasing the difficulty of the task led advisors to want less weight on their advice, but advisees placed more weight on the advice for difficult items, thus overweighting advice compared to advisors’ expectations (Experiment 2). Importantly, both over- and underweighting of advice as compared to advisor expectations caused advisors to evaluate advisees more negatively, which resulted in reduced willingness to give advice again in the future (Experiment 3), indicating that advisors want their advice used, but not too much.