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Faced with a mission-critical decision, who would you turn to for advice？ Someone you had great confidence in, surely. But several lines of research show that our instincts about where to turn to for counsel are often not completely correct.
My research looks at prejudices that affect how people use advice, including why they often blindly follow recommendations from people who-as far as they know-are as knowledgeable as they are. In studies I conducted with Don Moore of Carnegie Mellon University, for example, I found that people tend to overvalue advice when the problem they're addressing is hard and to undervalue it when the problem is easy.
In our experiments, subjects were asked to guess the weight of people in various pictures，some of which were in focus and some of which were unclear. For each picture, subjects guessed twice: the first time without advice and the second time with input from another participant. When the pictures were in focus, we found, subjects tended to discount the advice; apparently, they were confident in their ability to guess correctly. When the pictures were unclear, subjects leaned heavily on the advice of others and seemed less secure about their initial opinion. Because they misjudged the value of the advice they received-consistently overvaluing or undervaluing it depending on the difficulty of the problem-our subjects did not make the best guesses overall. They would have done better if they'd considered the advice equally，and to a moderate degree, on both hard and easy tasks.
Another advice-related prejudice I've found compels people to overvalue advice that they pay for. In one study I conducted, subjects answered different sets of questions about American histo-ry. Before answering some of the questions, they could get advice on the correct answer from an-other subject whom they knew was no more expert than they were. In one version of the experi-ment， people could get advice for free, while in another version, they paid for it. When they paid for advice, people tended to have firm belief in it, I suspect, by a combination of sunk-cost preju- dice and the nearly instinctual belief that cost and quality are linked.
51.1n the face of a mission-critical decision, people tend to _________
[ A] trust their own efforts
[ B ] rely on research findings
[ C] get affected by other's opinion
[D] seek help from the more know ledgable