The inclusion of anchors when seeking advice: Causes and consequences

Abstract

Scholars have devoted considerable research attention to examining how people use advice from others. However, there is much less research exploring the preceding step of how people solicit advice from others. Sometimes advice seekers include their own thinking in their requests for advice, providing anchors that make it difficult for their advisors to access their own independent judgments. Across naturalistic and laboratory samples, we find that advice seekers include anchors when seeking quantitative advice between 20 and 50 percent of the time. In five preregistered studies (N = 6,981), we investigate the causes and consequences of including anchors when seeking advice. We find that impression management motives increase the tendency to include anchors when seeking advice, while a goal of minimizing influence on advisors reduces the tendency to include anchors. We then show that anchors are indeed effective in achieving impression management goals, but that advice seekers who include them benefit less from opinion combination strategies such as averaging because they introduce shared sources of error. This work contributes to the literatures on advice seeking, anchoring, and collective judgments.