Is there a more reviled creature as 2010 begins than the expert? Or, as he or she is more commonly known, the “so-called expert”? The so-called experts said the housing market was sound. The so-called experts told us one thing, and then a totally contradictory thing, about when women should start getting regular mammograms. The so-called experts told us Bear Stearns was fine… just before it collapsed.
But, of course, as decades of romantic comedies have taught us, beneath any great hatred lies a bed of smoldering attraction. Experts couldn’t make a living doling out expert advice if people weren’t willing to gleefully fling open their wallets to pay to receive it. Cable news wouldn’t be singing with talking heads if people didn’t want to listen to those heads talk. And people wouldn’t glassily follow their GPS units off cliffs and into lakes if they didn’t relish the opportunity to stop thinking for themselves and let someone (or something) else take over the controls for a few blissful minutes.
Given this hate-love relationship with expert advice — we can’t help listening to it but we know we’ll regret it in the morning — how can we keep our heads screwed on straight when it’s on offer? When are we most susceptible to the charm and ease of listening to the experts? And what happens to our brains when we do?
The first thing to understand about expert advice is that it is, of course, not all bad. A person’s life experience is necessarily limited, and listening to people who know more than us is one of the main ways we acquire knowledge and learn to exist in the world. How do you get your printer to stop doing that thing? Your company’s computer expert will help you out. His or her advice will or won’t work, and most likely your problem will be solved.
Where we get into trouble is when a situation is filled with uncertainty — when it’s not so easy to verify if the advice we’re being given is right or wrong. As the saying goes, where facts are few, experts are many. And, intuitively enough, research shows that under conditions of uncertainty is exactly when we rely most on advice from others. What’s the best method to lose weight? How do I get ahead at work? Where should I invest my money?
That last one, in particular, has gotten a lot of people into a lot of trouble recently — which is why choosing between two financial rewards was a fitting subject for a recent experiment looking at how the brain handles expert advice.
In an experiment published in the open-access journal PLoS ONE last year, neuroeconomists from Emory University in Atlanta and Tilburg University in the Netherlands put undergraduates in fMRI scanners to take a look at what happened in their brains when they were offered expert advice during an economic task.
The task was to choose between two options: a small guaranteed payout or a lottery with a percentage chance of winning various sums. In half the trials, an expert — whose credentials were explained to the students to make him sound authoritative — would advise whether to “accept” or “reject” the various offers. In the other half of the trials, the students were told the expert’s advice was “unavailable.”
So, what happened? The relatively predictable part is that the students took the expert’s advice — their choices were pushed in the expert’s direction even when it was not economically optimal and even when it conflicted with their personal tolerance for risk (revealed in the trials where the advice was not on offer).
What was intriguing, though, was what the fMRI showed: Not only were the students swayed by the expert’s advice, but the areas of their brains involved in decision making — particularly areas involved in processing probabilities, such as the anterior and posterior cingulate cortex — showed significantly less activity when the expert’s advice was followed. As the study’s authors put it, the subjects’ brains were “offloading” the burden of decision making to the expert.
Now, the study had its limitations. The students were making these choices in a matter of seconds — not a lot of time for reflection. In the real world, most financial decisions are made with a bit more care. Hopefully. But the lesson is clear: It’s quite easy to allow expert advice to shut down our own critical thinking.
In a world where the vast majority of mutual funds take huge fees to underperform the S&P 500, where political pundits seem to rise higher the more wrong they are, and where the best health advice seems to change with the day of the week, letting go of our own critical faculties is the last thing any of us should be doing.
When we know where we’re going, the roads are well marked, and we’re able to double check the work — that’s when it makes sense to let experts be our mental GPS. But if we let them lull us into complacency, we may just end up underwater.
Ryan Sager writes the blog Neuroworld at TrueSlant.com.
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