Abstract: Individuals often solicit advice from others to help them build a wide informational basis and make an optimal decision, the difference between advice and judges’ initial opinion is referred as advice distance. According to the discounting effect, people are prone to selectively weight the advice that are close to them and neglect the advice that are far from them. Previous studies found a monotone decrease in advice taking as advice distance increase based on judges’ egocentric judgement. However, these studies may draw an incomplete picture due to the restricted category of advice distance. The assimilation effect of social judgement theory suggests that if the advice is very similar to judges’ initial decision, it has a great chance to be considered as practically equivalent to the judges’ own and also be ignored, so the present research extends the range of advice distance to explore the shape of the relation between advice distance and advice taking. Besides, it is worth noting that individuals often have different backgrounds about the decision events, hence they may sensitive to their own knowledge when they receive the advice. Therefore, we further investigate the moderation effect of external cues as well. The experiment adopted judge-advisor system as paradigm, taking advice distance as a within-subjects variable with 15 levels of advice deviation. Depended on the number of external cues, 80 participants were divided into 3 groups which were given 1 or 3 or 5 cues, respectively. The task included 30 trials, in the first phase, it required participants to estimate the distance between two countries and to rate their confidence about the answers (initial decision); In the second phase, participants were told that they would receive an advice from a reliable advisor, but in fact the advice was based on their initial estimation; In the final phase, participants were asked to estimate the distance of the aforementioned countries and to rate their confidence about the final answer once again (final decision). Advice weighting, absolute opinion shift and confidence change were applied as dependent variables. The results showed that there was an inversely U-shaped relation between advice distance and advice weighing, specifically, advice was weighted less when advice distance was low and high, while when it was at the middle level, advice was weighted more. And such relationship was moderated by the number of external cues, the inversely U-shaped relation only appeared in the three and five conditions. Whereas absolute opinion shift and confidence change toward the advice increased in a monotone fashion as advice distance increased, but neither of them was influenced by the external cues. In conclusion, distance effect’s model shape was different when advice taking measured in different ways, advice distance and advice weighing has a curvilinear pattern relationship which was moderated by external cues, even if far advice promoted individual to make larger absolute opinion judgement, it was still weighted less than near advice. And the more near advice to the initial decision, the more it served as a means for social validation. Our findings stress the importance of taking into account multi indexes of advice taking and contextual factors when investigating the advice utilization.

Key words: social judgment theory, advice distance, advice taking, confidence, external cues

摘要： 基于社会判断理论，研究以80名大学生为被试，通过JAS范式考察了建议距离对建议采纳和自信心变化的影响以及线索丰富性在这一过程中的作用。结果发现随着建议距离的增加，建议权重仅在线索信息较丰富的情况下呈先增后减的倒U型趋势，而绝对观点转变和自信心变化均不受线索丰富性的影响，分别呈递增和递减趋势。即建议距离对不同建议采纳指标有不同影响，建议距离与建议权重之间存在倒U曲线关系且线索丰富性起到了调节作用。

关键词: 社会判断理论, 建议距离, 建议采纳, 自信心, 线索丰富性