New research finds that people given advice by top performers thought that it helped them more, even though it usually didn’t.
When you want advice to achieve something, whom would you rather ask: the top performer in that area or someone barely scraping by? Most people would choose the top performer. That person’s advice, however, may not be any more helpful.
“Skillful performance and skillful teaching are not always the same thing, so we shouldn’t expect the best performers to necessarily be the best teachers as well,” said David Levari (Harvard Business School), lead author of a recent Psychological Science article.
Across four studies, he and coauthors APS Fellows Daniel T. Gilbert (Harvard University) and Timothy D. Wilson (University of Virginia) found that top performers don’t give better advice than other performers, at least in some domains. Rather, they just give more of it.
“People seem to mistake quantity for quality,” the researchers wrote. “Our studies suggest that in at least in some instances, people may overvalue advice from top performers.”
In the first study, Levari and colleagues set out to determine whether people believe an advisor’s performance is a robust indicator of the quality of their advice.
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