Anxiety, advice, and the ability to discern: feeling anxious motivates individuals to seek and use advice.

@article{Gino2012AnxietyAA,
  title={Anxiety, advice, and the ability to discern: feeling anxious motivates individuals to seek and use advice.},
  author={Francesca Gino and Alison Wood Brooks and Maurice E. Schweitzer},
  journal={Journal of personality and social psychology},
  year={2012},
  volume={102 3},
  pages={
          497-512
        }
}
Across 8 experiments, the influence of anxiety on advice seeking and advice taking is described. Anxious individuals are found to be more likely to seek and rely on advice than are those in a neutral emotional state (Experiment 1), but this pattern of results does not generalize to other negatively valenced emotions (Experiment 2). The relationships between anxiety and advice seeking and anxiety and advice taking are mediated by self-confidence; anxiety lowers self-confidence, which increases… 
View on PubMed
hbs.edu
197 Citations
Highly Influential Citations
12
Background Citations
56
Methods Citations
7
Results Citations
8

Tables from this paper

197 Citations

Advice Giving: A Subtle Pathway to Power
TLDR
It is shown that advice giving is an interpersonal behavior that enhances individuals’ sense of power and that those who seek power are motivated to engage in advice giving, and that the desire to feel powerful motivates advice giving.
Worry at Work: How State Anxiety Influences Negotiations, Advice, Reappraisal, and Performance
At work, sources of anxiety abound. Individuals worry about the quality of their work, their job security, and impressing their bosses. At the same time, many managers induce anxiety, incidentally or…
Are Depressed People More or Less Susceptible to Informational Social Influence?
When making judgments and decisions, people suffering from depression are often faced with opinions and advice from others (e.g., from their therapists) but it is unclear how their psychopathology…
Advice in Interaction: Quantity and Placement of Problem-Solving Behaviors
Prior research has given insufficient attention to the effects of interaction behavior on responses to advice. We drew on theories of advice evaluation and supportive communication to propose…
Evaluation sensitivity and advice seeking: The mediating role of self-uncertainty and moderation role of peer exclusion
Although advice seeking has attracted increasing attention from scholars, research exploring the antecedents of advice seeking remains relatively sparse. To address this gap, this study focuses on…
Imposing Advice on Powerful People
This paper examines how advice recipients’ feelings of power and the solicitation of advice affects the perception of advice. Participants were primed for low or high power, wrote about a personal…
Smart People Ask for (My) Advice: Seeking Advice Boosts Perceptions of Competence
TLDR
It is demonstrated that individuals perceive those who seek advice as more competent than those who do not, and this effect is moderated by task difficulty, advisor egocentrism, and advisor expertise.
Anxious, threatened, and also unethical: how anxiety makes individuals feel threatened and commit unethical acts.
TLDR
It is suggested and found that anxiety increases threat perception, which, in turn, results in self-interested unethical behaviors, which is in turn related to experienced threat and unethical behavior.
Variability in advice taking in decision making
TLDR
The results suggest that the willingness of accepting and using advice depends on history of advice taking, the individual traits, and mood, and that the gradual reduction of acceptance was not observed in participants with high empathy and low depressive scores.
Mitigating the Negative Effects of Customer Anxiety through Access to Human Contact
It is a well-established result in social psychology that when people feel anxious, they seek advice from others. However, increasingly companies that operate in high-anxiety settings (like financial…
...
...

References

SHOWING 1-10 OF 162 REFERENCES
Blinded by anger or feeling the love: how emotions influence advice taking.
TLDR
Across 2 experiments, the authors demonstrate that emotional states influence how receptive people are to advice, and they identify conditions under which leaders, policy makers, and advisors may be particularly influential.
Predicting Receptiveness to Advice: Characteristics of the Problem, the Advice-Giver, and the Recipient
Research on advice in supportive interactions indicates that receptiveness to advice (the extent to which advice is wanted) has a strong influence on how advice is evaluated. The current study…
The Normative Context of Advice as Social Support
Much of the existing research on social support overlooks the communicative processes that link supportive acts to beneficial effects. The present study represents an alternative approach: The…
Receiving Other People's Advice: Influence and Benefit
Power, competitiveness, and advice taking: Why the powerful don’t listen
Do we listen to advice just because we paid for it? The impact of advice cost on its use
Anticipatory anxiety and risk perception
This study tested the prediction that anxiety, arising from anticipation of a stressful examination (state anxiety), would be associated with an inflation of subjective risk in judgments of negative…
Contingent Effects of Anxiety on Message Elaboration and Persuasion
This research examined the effects of anxiety on subsequent message processing. Experiment 1, conducted just before the hand-over of Hong Kong to China in 1997, manipulated anxiety by presenting Hong…
Emotions and Anxiety: New Concepts, Methods, and Applications
Part 1: Origins of Fear, Anxiety, and Other Emotions 1. Stephen J. Suomi and Harry F. Harlow The Facts and Functions of Fear 2. Paul McReynolds Assimilation and Anxiety 3. James R. Averill Emotion…
Feeling and believing: the influence of emotion on trust.
TLDR
The authors found that incidental emotions significantly influence trust in unrelated settings and emotions characterized by other-person control and weak control appraisals (happiness) influence trust significantly more than emotions characterize by personal control (pride and guilt) or situational control (sadness).
...
...