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Behaviorial Psychology

This is Your Brain on Expert Advice

This is Your Brain on Expert Advice
TL;DR: Our brains tend to shut down and blindly follow expert advice, even when the advice is bad.

A 2009 study published in the journal PLoS ONE provides interesting insights into how our brains react to so-called "expert" financial advice. The research, conducted by a team of neuroscientists and economists, used brain imaging techniques to peer inside people's heads as they made financial decisions involving risk and uncertainty. In some cases, the participants had to rely on their own judgment. But in other trials, they were advised by a financial expert about what choice to make.

Here's a link to the research: Expert financial advice neurobiologically "Offloads" financial decision-making

People tend to blindly follow experts

The result: When left to think for themselves, participant's brains lit up in areas known to be involved in calculating value and weighing risks and rewards. But when expert advice was provided, these valuation regions went dark. Instead, the brain defaulted to areas involved in social cognition and theory of mind - in trying to figure out what the expert was thinking.

The presence of expert advice caused the participants to shut down their own independent value calculations and instead focus on uncritically following the expert opinion.

Essentially, the presence of expert advice caused the participants to shut down their own independent value calculations and instead focus on uncritically following the expert opinion. As the study authors put it, the expert advice "offloaded" the burden of financial decision-making from the individual's brain.

The implication is that people may be prone to blindly follow expert advice without engaging in any rational analysis of their own. The normal brain mechanisms for evaluating risks, rewards, and probabilities get bypassed. We switch from objective valuation to trying to get inside the expert's head.

Ignoring expert advice is stressful, even if it's wrong

What happens if the expert's advice is suboptimal or just plain wrong? The study found that regions involved in negative emotional arousal activated when people went against the expert's advice. Rejecting an expert opinion appears to be stressful, unnatural, and aversive at a neural level. Our brains are wired to follow the experts.

There are dangers to this instinct to conform to expert advice. While experts in finance and other fields certainly have valuable knowledge to impart, they can also make mistakes and have biases or ulterior motives. Blindly adhering to expert opinion deprives us of the ability to think critically and form our own judgments. And if an expert's advice is flawed, it could lead to harmful decisions, both at an individual and societal level, if followed en masse.