Is Expert Advice Generally Good Advice?

Source: iStock image by Weekend Images, Inc. Licensed to Art Markman

When you want to learn to do something, you generally seek out experts to help you along the way. For example, about 20 years ago, I wanted to take up the saxophone. A local music store directed me to a teacher who was also one of the best jazz sax players in town. I took lessons from him for 10 years, and learned a lot about how to play the instrument.

What made him a good person to teach me the saxophone? One possibility is that his expertise as a sax player made him an ideal candidate to teach me. Another possibility is that he was good at teaching, and that his expertise as a teacher was most important, while his ability as a sax player was secondary.

A fascinating paper by David Levari, Dan Gilbert, and Tim Wilson in the May 2022 issue of Psychological Science provides insight into this question.

The researchers started by having a number of people play a game that involved making as many words as possible of at least three letters from a 4x4 grid of letters (where words had to use letters touching each other, and no square could be used more than once). The game was selected, because there were big differences in ability across people.

In the first study, the researchers were just interested in testing the intuition that people believe that experts provide the best advice. So, after playing the game, participants were told that 100 previous participants of varying ability were asked to advise subsequent players on how best to play the game. Using a variety of different methods for asking this question, the researchers found that participants generally expect the best advice to be given by the best performers. That is, people believe experts will give the best advice.

In a second study, this hypothesis was put to the test. Advice was gathered from a number of players who played six rounds of the game. These individuals differed in their overall level of performance.

Then, a subsequent group of participants was run. One subset played a round of the game and then was shown advice from one of the previous players. After getting the advice, the players played an additional five rounds. At the end of the last round, this group rated how effective they thought the advice was. A second subset played the six rounds without getting any advice.

Overall, participants improved in the game as they played more rounds—suggesting that there are strategies people learn to play the game better. The participants who got advice improved more than the participants who did not get advice—so getting advice from another player was helpful. However, there was no correlation between the degree of improvement of the advice and the performance of the player who gave that advice. That is, good players and poor players were equally likely to give advice that was helpful (or not).

Interestingly, people who got advice from good players rated the advice as more helpful than people who got advice from poor players. This happened even though the players had no idea how well their advisor had performed. So, something about the way good players gave advice made the people receiving that advice believe they were getting good help.

Subsequent analyses of the advice given by different players found that good players tended to give more independent suggestions than poor players. Participants receiving that advice felt the advice with many tips would be more helpful. Despite this belief, the advice from good players was no more helpful at actually playing the game than the advice from poor players.

To return to the point I started with, then, who should we get as a teacher? A certain amount of expertise in a domain is important in order to provide good advice or teaching to someone else. But, being a good teacher involves a number of skills beyond just being a good performer. Good teachers know how to express their knowledge. They know how to connect with the knowledge of people with less skill. They are also skilled at understanding the errors that novices make and providing pathways to help those novices develop better knowledge and skills. All that means that you don’t need to learn from the most expert performer—you need to learn from the most expert teacher.