Advice

Psychology is a strange discipline.  One cause of this property is its pervasive nature.  Every time we do something we are behaving, and as a consequence something can be said about the psychology of that action.  This leads to a proliferation of kinds of psychology and psychologists.  Every time we do not do something this suggests some kind of control or readying, and again the discipline can comment.  A danger lurks: conjuring new forms of the discipline can be facile.

I lay awake last night (psychological explanation: anxiety) and mused on this. Could I come up with a new type of psychology?  The obvious way to do this was to think about what I had been doing all week and I soon realized that most of the week had been spent giving advice to students, colleagues and family members.  They may not have sought or wanted it, but this is what I had done.

On the surface this seems fairly mundane and areas such as organizational psychology, as well as the psychology of communication etc. could be recruited to account for the various behaviours I produced under the heading of advice. However, I found it hard to think of a subdiscipline within psychology that would properly account for the seeking of advice.

My general view is that advice is information, and that means (sound) advice will reduce uncertainty in a system.  I imagine everybody else in the world thinks this too. Quite often people seek advice about adjudicating between choices.  So, they have already reduced the conceptual space considerably and are simply trying to be certain about the consequences of each action along some acceptable time line.  At other times people have received an input from someone else that has disrupted a set of decisions they had previously made. In my experience free-form interpretation of university procedures often leads to situations of this sort.  Someone declares a view on the process, this spreads via social networks until it contacts a person or set of persons who had drawn radically different conclusions.  90% of the time the difference is inconsequential; the remaining instances lead to utter despair.

But the aspect of advice that interests me is how people go about selecting their advisor.  A couple of models immediately occurred to me.  Advisors may well have a reputation, so there is a lot of social information about them and their success in reducing uncertainty.  Alternatively, people may sample advice from a number of individuals.  The nature of their sampling procedure would be of interest.  Information foraging theory - a borrowing from optimal foraging ideas that kick started work in foraging within behavioural ecology - might be a place to start.  Intuitively, people might treat others as equally valuable information patches and move from patch to patch until their uncertainty was satiated.  However, if we build in reputation we then have a model where not all patches are equal.  This could lead to issues around accessing the high-value patch (the sought after and prestigious advisor) arising from competition. Competition could reduce access, it could also limit the time available to extract sufficient value.  Under these circumstances we might expect to see individuals distributing themselves as they would be more likely to maximize their utility (or reduce their uncertainty to a useful level) by visiting a patch of lesser value.

This could be modelled but it could also be experimentally investigated.  For example, a new procedure of some significance could be introduced into a department.  This procedure would be announced verbally at the end of a busy staff meeting, and an email reminding people to adhere to the new procedure would follow.  This should allow sufficient uncertainty to emerge such that advice is required.  Following this one could simply note the pathways (both electronic mail and physical foot work) taken by members of the department. In other words, which doors get knocked on, to what frequency, and is there an order of visitation?  We might predict a rush to the most prestigious (perhaps this is a way of operationalizing prestige), and then a tipping point will be reached when that person is no longer the first port of call.  In the background is an assumption that there will be individual differences in response latency to the introduced uncertainty.  (And I guess I am assuming things about access to information about patches and an ability to move between them with ease.  In foraging theory this is referred to as an ideal free distribution.)

So, there it is, we now have the psychology of advice seeking as a new area of work.  But, as noted, it relies on existing high level theories from behavioural ecology to frame it.  A better, more formal job can clearly be done - and perhaps has been.