Top performers don ’t always provide the best advice

This study affirmed the existence of a belief that many people clearly already have. But it was an important first step in the team’s investigation. Next, a fresh group of participants played six rounds of Word Scramble. The team noticed that the players did get better over time. This certainly suggests that performing well on this game requires some skill, which might in theory be trained by good advice. The players then wrote down some advice for future participants, and also rated the quality of their own advice, and how helpful they expected it to be. The analysis showed that the best performers believed that they had given the best advice. However, when pieces of advice were then given to a fresh group of players, this turned out not to be the case: players who were given advice from the best performers didn’t improve at the game any more than players given advice from from other performers.  The researchers also report a fascinating extra finding from this study: the second group of players rated advice that had come from the top performers as being the best — even though they had no knowledge of these people’s performance. In a fresh study, the team considered some possible explanations for this. Perhaps the top performers gave more articulate or more authoritative advice, for example. In fact, they found that it was the number of independent suggestions that mattered — and top performers offered more. “In short, advice from the best perfor...
Source: BPS RESEARCH DIGEST - Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Tags: leadership Social Source Type: blogs