Nudge Wiki

Concept

Advice-Giving Motivation Effect

motivation advice self-perception

Prompting someone who is struggling toward a goal to give advice to someone else facing the same struggle measurably improves the advice-giver's own subsequent performance — a different mechanism from Strategic Advice-Seeking (which covers the benefit to whoever asks for advice). Identified by Lauren Eskreis-Winkler (with Ayelet Fishbach and Angela Duckworth), who noticed in interviews that struggling people often had sophisticated insight into their own problems, and that being asked for advice (rather than given more of it) was itself unusually motivating.

Proposed mechanisms: giving advice signals to the giver that they possess more know-how than they credited themselves with (a confidence boost); the act of articulating advice requires genuine introspection about what would actually work; and having stated advice aloud, or to someone else, creates a felt hypocrisy cost to not following it themselves — related to the "saying-is-believing effect," where verbalizing a belief deepens genuine commitment to it.

A large field trial (Eskreis-Winkler, Milkman, Gromet & Duckworth, 2019) — see Eskreis-Winkler Florida High-School Advice Study — found the effect holds across student backgrounds (strong/weak students, free-lunch and wealthier students alike).

Discussed in

  • Episode 299 — 299-katy-milkman-learn-how-to-change-habits-in-39-minutes

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