Effects of time pressure on advice taking: Advisor ability vs. direct knowledge

Individuals often make decisions by examining the advice of others. Sniezek and Buckley (1995) explored the specific situation in which a single individual was responsible for making the final decision while receiving advice from multiple advisors (Judge Advisor System; JAS). Although individuals may want to process all of the information given to them by the advisors, they may not be able to do so due to situational constraints such as a limited amount of time. Time pressure has been shown to lead individuals to evaluate information using heuristics in several settings, but has not been examined in the JAS. We therefore examined whether time pressure would lead participants to use a specific type of heuristic, those based on expertise. Specifically we focused on isolating the expertise heuristic and separated two common qualities of an expert, ability and knowledge, into competing advisors in a JAS. In this study, judges under time pressure chose the strong argument less than judges with an unlimited amount of time to make their decision, p < .01. Additionally, the more an advisor was viewed as having expertise and the greater the amount of trust judges had in an advisor, the more likely they were to choose that advisor's recommendations. Overall, advisor qualities of ability and knowledge were both found to contribute to an individual's view of expertise, but these qualities contributed separately to the perception of expertise.