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Better be wrong than do wrong: Why erroneous advice is more persuasive than deceitful advice

The literature on advice and consulting suggests that managers and organizations invest great resources, sometimes excessively, in acquiring advice. However, people tend to underuse the advice they receive, and fail to adequately incorporate it in their judgments and decisions. One reason for this is suspicion: advisees may suspect that the advisor is making an error in judgment; alternatively, they may suspect that the advisor is deceiving them. This research examines the effect of these two reasons for suspicion on individuals’ use of advice.

Results of four experiments demonstrate that individuals discount advice more severely when suspecting deceit than when suspecting error. However, this is not due to an overt preference for honesty over competence. Rather, we find that each type of suspicion invokes a different perception of uncertainty. Error is associated with aleatory uncertainty that is due to chance factors and randomness, and leads to the acknowledgement of one’s ignorance. Deceit, however, is associated with epistemic uncertainty, which is perceived more as man-made. People believe epistemic uncertainty can be minimized with adequate knowledge or reasoning, leading to greater self-reliance. We found that changing individuals’ mindset from aleatory to epistemic and vice versa influenced the degree to which they used advice and eliminated the different suspicion effects previously observed. Implications for uncertainty research and judge-advisor relations are discussed.