In every setting, from the workplace to the doctor’s office, few people deny the value of getting a second opinion.

However, advice-seeking is most beneficial if the additional opinion is truly independent of the advice-seeker’s judgement, said Rick Larrick, the Hanes Corporation Foundation Professor of Management and Organizations at Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business.

“If you are asking a colleague about a project plan, you don’t want to add ‘I think we can get it done in eight weeks,’” Larrick said, “because that will likely ‘anchor’ the discussion around the eight weeks, as opposed to keeping an open discussion.”

In a new published paper Larrick co-authored with Jack Soll, the Gregory Mario & Jeremy Mario Distinguished Professor of Management and Organizations at Fuqua, and Fuqua Ph.D. candidate Jessica Reif, the researchers found that people are mostly aware of the benefit of independent advice, but they still tend to influence their advisors by adding their own opinion — what the researchers call an ‘anchor.’

The researchers thought the reason why people include anchors may come from their desire to appear competent, and to show that they are diligent enough to do the work by themselves.

“People know in the abstract that it's good not to influence the advice, but once they are in the heat of the moment, they want to show that they're smart and not lazy,” Larrick said.

Analyzing anchoring: A Personal Finance forum on Reddit

To find out how often people inadvertently influence the other person when asking for advice, the researchers examined the sub-Reddit r/personalfinance, an online forum on topics like credit cards, down payments on housing mortgages, and more.

“This was a really nice real-world setting where people ask a lot of quantitative questions — ‘how much should I save for a down payment on a house?’ or ‘how many credit cards should I have?’” Reif said.

The researchers analyzed more than 800 posts containing a request for advice and found that 30-40% of the time, people included their own thinking in the request.

“Instead of asking, ‘how many credit cards should I have,’ they pose the question as, 'are four credit cards too many to have?’” Reif said.

The researchers then recruited almost 7,000 online participants for five controlled experiments.

After validating the Reddit findings with one of the experiments, the researchers tested their hypotheses on whether people include anchors in their advice requests to manage their impression of competence and diligence.

One study asked 503 participants to rate the importance of a range of goals when asking advice, including showing competence, effort, and seeking independent advice. The researchers then presented the participants with the following scenario: if you had to estimate the height of a building and you were to be seeking advice, which kind of request would you pick? The results showed that participants who valued showing competence were more likely to include their own estimate in the request. The opposite happened for people who considered it important to avoid influencing the advisor.

In another study, the researchers asked more than 1200 participants to imagine they were managers of a medium-size company who had to estimate the cost of a team-building event. They were tasked with writing an email asking for advice, and randomly invited to show, in their message, that they were either 1) competent, 2) they had made the effort, or 3) that they were just seeking an unbiased opinion (a fourth control group didn’t receive any goal suggestion.)

The researchers found that people who had to show competence or effort were more likely to include anchors in their requests. On the other hand, people who have pure informational goals were less likely to include their thinking.

Why independent advice is more effective

The problem of revealing your judgement as you are asking for a second opinion is that it constrains the advisor’s thinking, Soll said. 

“The ‘anchor’ influences the information you consider and you get trapped,” he said. “Once you have a number in your head, you have a hard time subtracting it from your head. It sits there and it keeps influencing the kinds of answers you generate, and you're not even aware that it's happening.”

In another study, 808 participants had to estimate the height of a building, and some of them were allowed to solicit advice from six other people whose answers would be averaged together with theirs  (previous work by Larrick and Soll found that when using the independent opinions of a large crowd, the estimates tend to average around the truth, because the extreme opinions balance each other out). 

The new study showed the harm of including an estimate, Larrick said: Those who had included their estimate in the request ended up with a less accurate ‘crowd’ answer than those who avoided mentioning their own estimate. 

“The ‘anchored’ crowd gave more similar answers to each other than the ‘unanchored’ crowd, blocking the benefits of diverse thought,” he said. 

How to ask for advice

In a supplemental study, the researchers found that most people are aware of the benefit of uninfluenced advice. More than 60% of the participants who had previously included an anchor when requesting advice for themselves — implying they valued the goal of showing competence and effort — later recommended that others avoid doing so.

“In the middle of trying to ask for advice, they insert their own opinion,” Larrick said. “But later on, when reflecting on what someone else should do, they recognize that reducing influence is good."

However, there is a way to look smart with supervisors and colleagues and to receive independent advice, he said.   

“They could say, ‘I've been thinking about this and I have my own opinion, but I don't want to influence your decision,” Larrick said. 

A further study found it is just as effective to ‘say’ you have an answer in mind as it is to ‘share’ that answer.

These insights can help improve many organizational tasks, Larrick added, such as running an effective team meeting.

“A big danger in teams meetings is a leader blurting out their opinion at the beginning of a team meeting without team members first thinking for themselves, like when the boss says, ‘I think sales next month are going to be 100,000. What do you guys think?’" he said. “Once they have heard the number, they're anchored, and can no longer express an independent opinion. Instead, it is important to encourage team members to think independently and give them the space to share it.”