Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

We investigated how people would change and vary inaccepting advice when the effectiveness of advice was unclear.In each trial, participants estimated a monthly rent of anapartment room based on the attribute list. Then, anotherestimate by a real-estate agent was given as advice.Participants made a final estimation, either by taking theadvice fully, partially, or rejecting it totally. They repeated 48estimations without feedback. The weight of advice index,representing how much each participant weighed a givenadvice, gradually decreased as the number of trials increased.Interestingly, the gradual reduction of acceptance was notobserved in participants with high empathy and lowdepressive scores; they kept accepting advice even when theeffectiveness of advice was unclear. These results suggest thatthe willingness of accepting and using advice depends onhistory of advice taking, the individual traits, and mood.