Confidently at your service: Advisors alter their stated confidence to be helpful

• Published in: Organizational behavior and human decision processes 2022-07, Vol.171, p.104154, Article 104154
• Main Authors: Haran, Uriel, Mazar, Asaf, Hurwitz, Mordechai, Moran, Simone
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Advice; Confidence; Helpfulness; Uncertainty
• ISSN: 0749-5978; 1095-9920
• DOI: 10.1016/j.obhdp.2022.104154

•The role one assumes in a social exchange affects the way one expresses confidence.•Advisors want to be helpful to advisees in their decision making.•They do so by increasing stated confidence when concerns of misleading are low.•The motivation to help the advisee reach a decision underlies the effect.•People consciously state high confidence in advice and expect others to do the same. When giving advice, people seek to inform others, but also help them reach a decision. We investigate how the motivation to help affects the confidence people express when advising others. We propose that assuming the role of advisor instigates a desire to help the advisee decide more easily. This desire in turn leads advisors to communicate higher confidence than they actually feel, provided that the environment is sufficiently certain, and thus the risk of misleading the advisee is low. We test our predictions in five studies, using experimental tasks (Studies 1–3), a survey of experienced professionals (Study 4) and an organizational scenario (Study 5). We find that in high-certainty environments, people convey higher confidence when providing advice than private judgments. This effect is driven by the motivation of advisors to facilitate advisees’ decision making: the higher advisors’ desire to help, the more pronounced the effect on their stated confidence.