I am so naive

I seriously thought that when people ask me for advice, or go to a financial adviser to ask for investment recommendations or a financial plan, they want to make better decisions. How wrong I was.

Imagine you have a serious dilemma in life. Then imagine someone you know who you would ask for advice, but who isn’t involved in the dilemma. What are the two pieces of advice this person might give you? How would you rate the advice in each case?

What I just described is the first of five experiments with hundreds of volunteers on the scientific experimental platform Prolific that Alexis Gordon and Maurice Schweitzer from the University of Pennsylvania set up. The only thing I forgot to mention is that before asking the volunteers to rate the advice, they also distracted them with a series of other questions and asked them to rate their preferred option for the dilemma.

Then, the volunteers had to rate how they would react if the person they imagined giving them advice had recommended option A or option B to solve their dilemma. Well, here is how they rated the advice given. People clearly rated advice as better if it agreed with their preferred option to solve the dilemma, and they felt more confident when given advice that confirmed their initial hunch.

Advice that confirms preferences increases satisfaction

Source: Gordon and Schweitzer (2025)

Now, this experiment may look contrived and artificial, but the researchers repeated the experiment with real-life situations and found the same results. Essentially, people prefer advice that confirms their pre-existing beliefs or their preferences, no matter how small they are to begin with.

And it gets better. In another experiment, the researchers asked the volunteers to identify two people they knew they could ask for advice. Then they asked them to imagine that person 1 would advise them to choose option A, while person 2 would advise them to choose option B. Again, the volunteers were also asked which option they were inclined to prefer. Guess which person was more likely to be asked for advice by the volunteers? Correct, the volunteers preferred to ask the person who was more likely to agree with them for advice.

People prefer advisers who agree with them

Source: Gordon and Schweitzer (2025)

The implications for financial advisers are clear. People do not come to you for independent advice. They come to you because they want to stay in their bubble and want you to confirm their initial preferences. And unfortunately, that is what makes being a financial adviser so difficult. People don’t want to hear ‘the truth’, but ‘their truth’ and if you give them ‘the truth’, what you may end up with is good advice and no client.