(Telling this to a would-be salesman is like telling a sprinter to “run fast.”)

If you can “coat” your advice in the guise of the other person’s discovery, they’ll take it for sure.

Another instance in which people take advice is when it comes from a close, trusted, and respected friend or mentor.

The contrapositive is also true. This is why teens do not take advice from the high school health teacher.

Suddenly it’s a matter of: “now this coin toss is going to make me walk out of this store with these boring oatmeal cookies, and I can almost feel them in my mouth right now, and they are going to be bland and dry”

…instead of: “Hmm…oatmeal or fudge-pistachio? How ever will I pick?”

a) advice that will cost you something to implement, like ’stop smoking!’ or ‘eat healthy!’.
b) advice without such cost like ‘the correct answer to the question is nr. 3′

If you ever tried to break an ingrained habit you know what I’m refering to at a). The big question here becomes what has more power in you: the emotional or rational brain.

How does this sort of study take into account the possibility that the reason the teen (say) does not seem to react to the advice given in the study, is that the teen is already receiving plenty of advice outside of the study?

If the “control group” receiving no advice within the study in fact has received average 50 hours of advice over the years, and if the “advised group” receives 1 hour of advice within the study, then the difference between the “control group” and “advised group” is minuscule.

This is a good point. Most teens have probably already heard about the health risks of smoking and been warned against it, and most of them have probably already made up their mind based on this previous advice. A better study would give students helpful advice about a subject on which they probably have not been advised before.

What advice are the teens given? Don’t start smoking?

They knew that would be the advice before they were given it, so why should it have an effect?

However the case for following advice may not be quite as strong as the authors suggest. The basis of the statistics Robin quotes are that when players followed the audience advice, they were right 16 times out of 23; when players did the opposite of what was advised, they were right 7 times out of 13, a lower percentage. But if players had slavishly followed the audience advice, instead of being right 23 times out of 36, they would actually have done worse. The audience was right only 22 times out of 36. Players, weighing the advice, did slightly better than the audience. It’s not clear then that they should have followed the advice more closely.

The American version of DOND does not use audience advice. Another show that does is Who Wants To Be A Millionaire, which lets players poll the audience one time during a series of increasingly difficult trivia questions. In my informal observations, players almost always do follow the audience advice, and the audience is almost always right.

George, you beat me to the punch–this is exactly why they ask for the audience’s opinion. Note that this scenario is much different than the other two, as it entails an immediate and tangible gain or loss.

As for smoking advice for teens, this will clearly have no effect. Most teens neither have a good understanding of probability nor have any grasp of a 30-year time frame. Telling them that their risks of lung cancer and heart disease will triple (or whatever) in the distant future is not useful.

My guess is that in general, solicited advice has a greater effect than unsolicited advice, and advice from someone you know has a greater effect than that of a stranger.

~Ann Rand

While I agree with Rand and Ian, generally advice should and does go unheeded, sometimes it is valuable to your listener, and the cost is always low, so why not offer away. Just expect it to be ignored.

As for why people listen sometimes but not others, probably has to do with the listeners awareness of their own level of knowledge, and there perception of the adviser’s level of knowledge. I suppose the above shows that people are not good at judging these.