Tips From the Top: Do the Best Performers Really Give the Best Advice?

Abstract

Everyone knows that if you want to learn how to do something, you should get advice from people who do it well. But is everyone right? In a series of studies ( N = 8,693), adult participants played a game after receiving performance advice from previous participants. Although advice from the best-performing advisors was no more beneficial than advice from other advisors, participants believed that it had been—and they believed this despite the fact that they were told nothing about their advisors’ performance. Why? The best performers did not give better advice, but they did give more of it, and participants apparently mistook quantity for quality. These studies suggest that performing and advising may often be unrelated skills and that in at least some domains, people may overvalue advice from top performers.