Tomasz Zaleskiewicz, Agata Gasiorowska, Katarzyna Stasiuk, Renata Maksymiuk, Yoram Bar-Tal
Abstract
The goal of this experimental project was to investigate lay peoples' perceptions of epistemic authority (EA) in the field of finance. EA is defined as the extent to which a source of information is treated as evidence for judgments independently of its objective expertise and based on subjective beliefs. Previous research suggested that EA evaluations are biased and that lay people tend to ascribe higher EA to experts who advise action (in the case of medical experts) or confirm clients' expectations (in the case of politicians). However, there has been no research into biases in lay evaluations of financial experts and this project is aimed to fill this gap. Experiment 1 showed that lay people tended to ascribe greater authority to financial consultants who gave more active advice to clients considering taking out a mortgage. Experiment 2 confirmed the action advice effect found in Experiment 1. However, the outcomes of Experiments 2 and - particularly - 3 suggested that this bias might also be due to clients' desire to confirm their own opinions. Experiment 2 showed that the action advice effect was moderated by clients' own opinions on taking loans. Lay people ascribed the greatest EA to the advisor in the scenario in which he advised taking action and where this coincided with the client's positive opinion on the advisability of taking out a loan. In Experiment 3 only participants with a positive opinion on the financial product ascribed greater authority to experts who recommended it; participants whose opinion was negative tended to rate consultants who advised rejecting the product more highly. To conclude, these three experiments revealed that lay people ascribe higher EA to financial consultants who advise action rather than maintenance of the status quo, but this effect is limited by confirmation bias: when the client's a priori opinion is salient, greater authority is ascribed to experts whose advice confirms it. In this sense, results presented in the present paper suggest that the action advice effect might be also interpreted as a specific manifestation of confirmation bias.
This research output has an Altmetric Attention Score of 1. This is our high-level measure of the quality and quantity of online attention that it has received. This Attention Score, as well as the ranking and number of research outputs shown below, was calculated when the research output was last mentioned on 13 September 2016.
All research outputs
#17,119,626
of 25,151,710 outputs
Outputs from Frontiers in Psychology
#20,949
of 33,965 outputs
Outputs of similar age
#213,507
of 330,603 outputs
Outputs of similar age from Frontiers in Psychology
#317
of 435 outputs
Altmetric has tracked 25,151,710 research outputs across all sources so far. This one is in the 21st percentile – i.e., 21% of other outputs scored the same or lower than it.
So far Altmetric has tracked 33,965 research outputs from this source. They typically receive a lot more attention than average, with a mean Attention Score of 13.1. This one is in the 32nd percentile – i.e., 32% of its peers scored the same or lower than it.
Older research outputs will score higher simply because they've had more time to accumulate mentions. To account for age we can compare this Altmetric Attention Score to the 330,603 tracked outputs that were published within six weeks on either side of this one in any source. This one is in the 27th percentile – i.e., 27% of its contemporaries scored the same or lower than it.
We're also able to compare this research output to 435 others from the same source and published within six weeks on either side of this one. This one is in the 23rd percentile – i.e., 23% of its contemporaries scored the same or lower than it.
