Why Do People Listen To “Experts” Even When They Are Inaccurate?

From health care professionals to political pundits, policy advisors to sports commentators, advisors are often portrayed as experts in their respective fields. These experts can make surprisingly inaccurate predictions about the future, yet people continue to trust in their predictions. For example, investors make stock investments based on the advice of financial “gurus” who are at chance at predicting the market, and consumers adopt questionable health practices recommended by medical talk shows. This behavior is puzzling – why do people hurt themselves by repeatedly listening to the advice of “experts” who perform no better than chance?

In a series of three experiments, we explored the causes and consequences of the undue optimism in advisors. We had participants predict the price fluctuations of a fictitious stock in an experimental task that mimicked real-world financial decision-making. Participants could rely on trends in the stock as well as advice from financial advisors to make their predictions. The advisors varied in their accuracy, performing reliably above, at, or below chance. Despite encountering each advisor multiple times, participants consistently overestimated the advisors’ expertise, following the advisors’ advice more than warranted by the advisors’ performance.

Using computational models, we dynamically tracked participants’ beliefs about the advisors over the course of the experiment. This allowed us to tease apart two distinct sources of biases – (i) optimistic initial expectations about the advisors and (ii) confirmation bias in how those expectations are updated. Both components were necessary for participants to develop persistently inflated beliefs about the advisors. If participants’ initial beliefs were not optimistic, confirmation bias alone would not lead to systematically biased beliefs. Similarly, if participants had optimistic initial beliefs but updated them appropriately, they would arrive at an accurate estimate of the advisors’ expertise over time.

Having explored the cognitive processes underlying optimism biases in advice-taking, we wanted to investigate strategies to help people incorporate advice more optimally. We reasoned that if optimistic initial expectations indeed drove the unrealistic optimism in advice-taking, manipulating participants’ initial expectations could mitigate these biases. In Experiment 2, we confirmed this prediction by showing that participants were no longer optimistically biased when we provided them with accurate expectations about each advisor.  

In Experiment 3, we tried an alternative approach of calibrating participants’ expectations. Previous work suggests that the aggregated opinion of many individuals can come remarkably close to the truth, a phenomenon commonly known as “the wisdom of the crowds”. We thus collected Yelp-like star ratings of each advisor from an initial group of participants who completed the task, and presented the average ratings to a second group of participants at the start of the experiment. The hope was that the aggregated crowdsourced ratings would provide an accurate impression of advisors’ expertise, and that presenting these ratings to the second group of participants could help them avoid developing overly optimistic beliefs about the advisors.

We found, however, that the ratings from the first group were themselves optimistically biased. Instead of calibrating the expectations, they propagated and exaggerated the over-optimism in the advisors. As a result, participants in the second group were even more optimistically biased than the initial group. These results provide a possible explanation of the longevity of “expert” advisors – the media propagates optimistic expectations about these advisors, expectations that could be wrong yet resistant to change.  

How then, can people guard against becoming optimistically blinded when taking advice? In the book “Superforecasting”, Tetlock and Gardner found that experts made more accurate predictions when they have to make quantitative predictions that they were then held accountable for. Here, we argue that similar strategies can help advice-takers determine when and from whom to take advice. Relying on hearsay, intuition and general impressions is likely to result in bias. Instead, we ought to tabulate and make public quantitative metrics of advisor performance, so that advice-takers can consider them when deciding whether to utilize a piece of advice. Expect advisors can often be helpful, but knowing when they are not will help advice-takers discern how to incorporate advice when making choices.


Yuan Chang Leong is a graduate student in Professor Jamil Zaki’s Stanford Social Neuroscience Lab. His research combines behavioral experiments, computational modeling and neuroimaging to study how motivations and expectations influence learning and decision-making.

Jamil Zaki is an Assistant Professor of Psychology at Stanford University. His research focuses on the cognitive and neural bases of social behavior, and in particular on how people respond to each other's emotions (empathy), why they conform to each other (social influence), and why they choose to help each other (prosociality).

Gender Roles Highlight Gender Bias in Judicial Decisions

Judges may be just as biased or even more biased than the general public in deciding court cases where traditional gender roles are challenged, according to a new study published in the journal Social Psychological and Personality Science.

This study examined the role of gender bias relating to judges and legal decisions, and the sex discrimination worked both ways, sometimes against women and sometimes against men.

“These results show that judges’ ideology and life experiences might influence their court decisions,” said Andrea Miller, PhD, a visiting assistant professor of psychology at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. “Many judges are not able to factor out their personal beliefs while they are considering court cases, even when they have the best possible intentions.”

More than 500 judges from a state court system (68 percent men, 30 percent women, and 2 percent unidentified) participated in the study in an effort by that court system to address gender bias. The court system wasn’t identified for confidentiality reasons.

“The judges who participated in the study did so at great personal and professional risk because they care deeply about confronting the possibility that there might be social group disparities in case outcomes,” stated Miller, “This state court system has become a leader in the search for evidence-based solutions to the problem of implicit bias.”

More than 500 lay people (59 percent men, 41 percent women) also were recruited online to take part in the study.

The judges and lay people analyzed two mock court cases, including a child custody case and a sex discrimination lawsuit where the plaintiff was presented as either a man or woman. The participants also completed surveys about their beliefs in traditional gender roles, such as stereotypes that women are more interested in raising children than in their careers and that children are better off if their fathers are the primary breadwinners for the family.

In the sex discrimination lawsuit, the plaintiff alleged that he or she was denied a promotion after taking six weeks of paid parental leave to care for an adopted baby. The plaintiff also wanted to introduce expert evidence from a psychologist about research on sex discrimination. Judges who supported traditional gender roles were more likely than lay people with similar gender ideologies to dismiss the case or rule against a female plaintiff.

In the divorce case, the father and mother both sought primary custody of their two children. Both spouses worked full-time jobs and sometimes had conflicts with caring for their children. Judges and lay people who supported traditional gender roles allocated more custody time to the mother than to the equally-qualified father, but the judges were even more biased in favoring the mother than were laypeople. Only three percent of the judges in the sample gave the father more custody time than the mother.

“In both of these cases, support for traditional gender roles was associated with decisions that encouraged women to engage in more family caregiving at the expense of their careers and discouraged men from participating in family caregiving at all.” Miller said.  

“Cultural ideas about gender bias may shape judges’ decision-making as much as the rest of us,” Miller said. “The significant expertise that judges possess doesn’t inoculate them again decision-making biases, and we can’t expect much change until we see policy reforms that address decision-making procedures in the courtroom.”     


Andrea L. Miller, Expertise Fails to Attenuate Gendered Biases in Judicial Decision-Making. Social Psychological and Personality Science. First Published April 2, 2018

Social Psychological and Personality Science (SPPS) is an official journal of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology (SPSP), the Association for Research in Personality (ARP), the European Association of Social Psychology (EASP), and the Society for Experimental Social Psychology (SESP). Social Psychological and Personality Science publishes innovative and rigorous short reports of empirical research on the latest advances in personality and social psychology.

Do You Have a Lot of Knowledge About Nonverbal Communication?

How should you improve your communication skills? I am sometimes asked by students, "Professor, I want to be able to communicate better" or "I want to acquire communication skills." Whenever I would then ask, "What do you think you should do?" some students would answer, "I guess I need to gain more experience" or "My parents and people at my part-time job advised me that 'Practice makes perfect.'"

It is true that there are aspects of communication that involve "learning physically" and "becoming accustomed" by accumulating experience. However, is that enough? Will communication improve with experience?

When we think of knowledge, studying and learning may come to mind, but when we play sports or when we cook, we always use our accumulated knowledge to act. For example, when practicing figure skating, if all you have to do is skate on ice, you may become capable of doing it well by getting your body used to the feeling of balancing despite falling over and over again. However, if you want to do advanced jumps and spins, you will not be able to do it well unless you know and understand theories and move your body based on those theories.

The same is true when communicating with others. By repeating the experience, you will be able to communicate at a certain level. However, if you are aiming for better communication and more desirable communication skills, it is necessary to acquire the theory and rules of communication as knowledge, and then generate messages and interpret messages received from others. In other words, correct and abundant knowledge about interpersonal communication influences the quality of communication, such as creating messages well and reading the intentions and emotions of others appropriately.

What is Knowledge About Nonverbal Communication?

Do you know specifically what kind of differences there are in facial expressions when others are happy versus when they are angry? Do you know the peculiarities of the way you speak when you are stressed? To have knowledge about nonverbal communication is to know the characteristics and rules of human communication behavior concretely, rather than vaguely. Now, do you have correct and abundant knowledge?

Psychologists Janelle Rosip and Judith Hall focused on nonverbal communication and developed the Test of Nonverbal Cue Knowledge (TONCK), which measures a person's knowledge related to nonverbal cues. This was a test in the form of answering a question, such as "Rapid head nods are a signal to the speaker to finish quickly," with a choice of either true or false. However, the TONCK had 81 items, a large number, and so, along with Judith Hall, I developed a new version (TONCK-II) to make it easier to use. People who have a high percentage of correct answers on this test have a lot of correct knowledge about nonverbal communication. The TONCK tests and another one, the GEMOK-Features which was developed by Swiss psychologists Katja Schlegel and Klaus Scherer to measure knowledge about cues to emotion, are the only validated tests of nonverbal cue knowledge. Many avenues of future research open up with these tests. Two things we already know: People who score higher on these knowledge tests actually are better at interpreting emotional expressions conveyed by face, body, and voice, as measured with tests showing people's nonverbal cues. And, women tend to have an edge over men in their knowledge of nonverbal communication.

Negative Effects of Inaccurate Knowledge

If knowledge is to be acquired, of course it must be accurate knowledge. However, when it comes to communication, it is difficult to determine what the correct answer is in the first place, and the correct answer may change depending on the context. Therefore, the knowledge that you possess may actually be wrong. For example, according to Quinn Hirschi at the University of Virginia and colleagues, people assume that speaking less when meeting someone for the first time makes you more likeable. However, when they conducted an experiment, they found that this belief was false, and that the more people spoke, the more likeable they were.

False knowledge and beliefs can lead to ineffective or undesirable communication behaviors. In addition, people sometimes possess stereotypical cognitions of gender, nationality, age, etc. regarding communication behaviors. While there are communication behaviors that actually differ according to gender and culture, others are simply based on people's assumptions. Having correct knowledge is critical.

To those of you who read this article and decided to go to a bookstore and buy a book on communication: There are many unfounded and unreliable manuals in the world, so be careful when choosing books!


For Further Reading

Ogawa, K., & Hall, J. A. (2022). Development of the Test of Nonverbal Cue Knowledge-II (TONCK-II). Journal of Nonverbal Behavior, 46(4), 569-592. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10919-022-00414-5

Rosip, J. C., & Hall, J. A. (2004). Knowledge of nonverbal cues, gender, and nonverbal decoding accuracy. Journal of Nonverbal Behavior, 28(4), 267–286. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10919-004-4159-6

Schlegel, K., & Scherer, K. R. (2018). The nomological network of emotional knowledge and understanding in adults: Evidence from two new performance-based tests. Cognition and Emotion, 32(8), 1514–1530. https://doi.org/10.1080/02699931.2017.1414687


Kazumi Ogawa is Professor of Faculty of Psychology at Aichi Shukutoku University in Japan. She is interested in how we can improve our interpersonal communication performance, and in recent years has been studying the effectiveness of knowledge for interpersonal communication.

Becoming an Expert in Emotion

We all know people who are better than others at abilities related to emotion: they are more in tune with their emotions, can better accept or regulate them, can harness them to get things done, and more. These abilities are widely associated with positive outcomes and have clear ties to well-being. People who are 'good at emotion'—emotion experts, you might say—tend to be healthier mentally and physically, accomplish their scholastic and professional goals, and adapt more easily to different personal and social situations.

So, how do you become such an expert in emotion? Based on our recent review of the literature, my colleagues and I suggest that you can bolster your skills in four key ways, each of which corresponds to a defining characteristic of expertise in emotion.

  • Increase your knowledge of emotion and range of emotion words. Reading scientific summaries can help, as can picking up some good narrative fiction. Why? Because expertise is supported by extensive and specific knowledge about the domain in question. Experts must know, in detail, about their subject matter. This knowledge allows 'experts' to make better distinctions.  Have you ever been around someone who could tell the difference between the colors lime, olive, and chartreuse—while your other friend sees only yellow versus green? This is like how experts can talk and think about their ideas in a fine-grained manner. Similarly, emotion experts have categories for types of emotional experiences that are diverse and nuanced, which they can easily name using specific words—they might feel "disappointed" rather than simply "bad," "ecstatic" more than plain "good."
  • Take notice of what's going on in and around you during emotional experiences. How have you been sleeping and eating? Where are you and what are the others around you doing? These pieces of information are the building blocks of emotional experience, and experts have a developed capacity for noticing and analyzing them. Experts don't just know a lot—they know what to do with it. They might see things in a situation that may not be obvious to others, and they use these insights to accomplish their goals. Consider the way a professional tennis player takes in the ball's exact angle, velocity, and more to deliver the perfect return. Emotion experts use information from their body and the world to their benefit. They focus on information that is relevant to the situation at hand, as when a person preparing for a public speech chooses to interpret their heart palpitations as excitement or preparation, rather than as anxiety or failure.
  • Put yourself in a variety of emotion-evoking situations. Consider leaving your comfort zone by doing an unfamiliar activity, appreciating art, or talking to somebody new. Expertise is demonstrated by stable, high-level performance. An 'expert' shows their ability or skill reliably and across different occasions; one single display of brilliance is not enough. At the same time, expertise also means that your behavior is sensitive to changing needs. The most adaptive response will vary from moment to moment (think about the tennis game), and experts flexibly update their approach. The same holds for emotion experts. Different situations call for different emotions, and emotion experts are nimble at identifying these needs and switching gears. They can also demonstrate their expertise by communicating their thoughts and feelings in a context-appropriate and sophisticated way: they can walk the walk and talk the talk.
  • Reflect on your emotional experiences in ways that make them meaningful. Maybe briefly describe them in a journal entry or discuss them with someone you trust. Exercise your emotions! Expertise is developed through deliberate practice. Experts do a lot of training to get where they are, intentionally working to improve their existing skills and seeking out opportunities to acquire new ones. This requires awareness and sustained attention. Chess masters regularly evaluate themselves, efficiently studying past actions so they can better predict what will happen next. Likewise, emotion experts actively attend to their experiences of emotion and may engage others—friends and family, partners, or therapists—in helping them see things from new perspectives. In this way, emotion experts can become better equipped for future events and challenges.

Woman juggling a group of emojis with a range of sad to happy facesThese ideas are not an exhaustive list. There are a lot of ways—we found over 40!—that you can be 'good at emotion.' You've likely heard of some of these already, such as emotional intelligence. In our review, we distilled the core ways in which these forms of expertise in emotion are similar. These characteristics paint a path forward for how to become an expert yourself. We do not yet know which are more important for health and well-being, and there may also be others. Still, if you want to be 'good at emotion,' the suggestions outlined above are a good place to start. Here's to knowing, adapting, and harnessing your feelings. Here's to becoming an expert in emotion!


For Further Reading

Hoemann, K., Nielson, C., Yuen, A., Gurera, J. W., Quigley, K. S., & Barrett, L. F. (2021). Expertise in emotion: A scoping review and unifying framework for individual differences in the mental representation of emotional experience. Psychological Bulletin147(11), 1159-1183. https://doi.org/10.1037/bul0000327

Bédard, J., & Chi, M. T. H. (1992). Expertise. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 1(4), 135–139. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8721.ep10769799

Ericsson, K. A., Hoffman, R. R., & Kozbelt, A. (2018). The Cambridge handbook of expertise and expert performance. Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781316480748


Katie Hoemann is a postdoctoral fellow at KU Leuven in Belgium. She studies the role that concepts and language play in how we make meaning of emotion.