Using advice and assessing its usefulness

Advisors vary in quality. People should make more use of better advisors: they should weight their advice more heavily. They should also assess them as providing more useful advice: they should express greater confidence in their advice by estimating that it has a higher probability of being correct. We discuss whether someone who is good at using advice will be good at assessing it (or vice versa). Performance in these tasks may be dissociated because they depend on different underlying cognitive processes. This issue of whether there is a dissociation between use of advice and assessment of its usefulness has implications for the development of automated systems designed to provide users with expertise and decision support. We review three areas of research relevant to the relation between use of advice and assessment of its usefulness. Then we summarize findings of Harvey, Harries and Fischer (1998) indicating that people are better at assessing the usefulness of advice than at using it. Implications for systems development are discussed.