Abstract
Advice-taking has always been a research hotspot in the field of decision making. From perspectives of information processing, researchers have proposed a variety of theories for explaining mechanisms of advice discounting, including anchoring and adjustment, egocentric bias and information asymmetry theory. Advice taking can also be defined as a form of interpersonal interaction, suggesting that decision makers may also consider how whether they follow advice or not affects others’ evaluations and impressions of them.
Studies have approved that individuals can aware that others form impressions of themselves based on the outcomes of their decisions. This phenomenon is referred to as meta-perception or as judgments on "how others view us". Further research has found that because individuals are aware that others form their own impressions based on the results of their own decisions, they strategically adjust their decision-making strategies to make an ideal impression and in turn achieve goals of impression management. So we suggested that decision makers may adopt or reject others’suggestions in order to gain some impression, that is, the motivation of impression management will affect the adoption of advice.
Impression management is that people use their social behavior as a means of communicating information about (or an image of) themselves to others. Such "self-presentation" is aimed at establishing, maintaining, or refining an image of the individual in the minds of others. Situation is the premise of impression management. The degree of impression management varies with the public and private of the situation. The more open the situation, the more need for impression management. Because the motivation of impression management includes two aspects: impression formation and impression maintenance, two parallel experiments were designed in this paper. Study 1 discusses the influence of impression establishing in advice-taking, study 2 discusses the influence of impression maintaining in advice-taking.
In study 1, a 2 (expectation impression: warmth, competence)×2 (situation openness: public, private) between- subjects experiment was designed. Subjects were asked to imagine themselves participating in an interview under public and private conditions. According to the characteristics required by the job, the subjects formed different expectations impression. The purpose is to explore the influence of impression formation on advice-taking. In study 2, we also used a 2 (impression label: warmth, competence)×2 (situation openness: public, private) between-subjects experiment design to explore the influence of impression maintenance on advice-taking. Subjects are told that they need to take a personality test to label their warmth competence.
The results are as follows:
1. Expectation impression will affect the advice-taking. In public condition, when individuals want to form a warm impression, they will adopt more advice. When individuals want to form an impression of competence, they will adopt less advice.
2. Self-labeling will affect the advice-taking. In public condition, when individuals want to maintain the original warm impression, the weight of advice is higher than that want to maintain the original competence impression.
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Impact of Situation Openness and Individual’s Impression Management Motivation on Advice Taking[J]. Journal of Psychological Science. 2022, 45(5): 1198-1205
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