With AI, there’s plenty of advice available, but we don’t make the most of it

Thanks to digital tools and AI, we have access to a wealth of high-quality advice, but the ease of access to this advice does not guarantee better decisions. In most professional and everyday contexts, the final decision still rests with a person, who must determine when to trust the adviser, when to rely on their own judgement, and how to combine the two sources of information. This aspect of our decision-making process is explored in the study ‘Adaptive yet suboptimal integration of advice in decision-making’, published in the journal *Communications Psychology* (part of the Nature group) and led by the University of Milan-Bicocca in collaboration with the University of Pavia.

The research team, comprising Joshua Zonca (psychology), Alice Giampino (statistics) and Carlo Reverberi (psychology) from Milano-Bicocca, together with Paolo Cherubini (behavioural sciences, University of Pavia), sought to measure the extent to which people put external advice into practice.

In the two experiments, 89 participants interacted with seven ‘artificial advisers’, each with a different profile. Some advisers were more or less competent than the participant, some were more overconfident or more cautious, and some were more or less reliable in their confidence in their answers. One final adviser, however, was a sort of ‘lookalike’, with characteristics similar to those of the participant.

The results show that people do not take sufficient account of the characteristics of the advisers. Performance improves after receiving advice, but not as much as it could.

Joshua Zonca explains: ‘To understand how this works, we can use an analogy. Let’s imagine we’ve saved a small amount of money and want to invest it. We already have our own idea, but, to avoid making mistakes, we ask two acquaintances for advice. The first is the classic braggart, always absolutely sure of himself, who tells us without hesitation: ‘Do this!’ The second is more cautious, but we know he’s often right: ‘I think it’s better to do this other thing.’ To make the best decision, we shouldn’t simply listen to whoever speaks with the most conviction: we should consider how competent each person really is and how reliable their confidence is. And, in some cases, we should even give the advice we receive more weight than our initial opinion. Yet this often doesn’t happen.”