Smart People Ask for (My) Advice: Seeking Advice Boosts Perceptions of Competence

In these experiments, people who asked for advice were judged more competent; task difficulty and whom they asked affected the result.

Brooks, A. W., Gino, F. & Schweitzer, M. E. (2015). Smart People Ask for (My) Advice: Seeking Advice Boosts Perceptions of Competence. Management Science, 61(6), 1421–1435.

Type

Journal article

Find it

doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2014.2054

Checked

Against the abstract, 16 September 2026

Why it is on the list

People hold back from asking for advice for fear of appearing incompetent. The paper’s next sentence is the one week 8 reads out: This fear, however, is misplaced. Across their experiments, the person who asked for advice was judged more competent than the person who did not. Three things moved the effect: it was stronger when the task was difficult rather than easy, when advice was sought from that person personally rather than from others, and when it was sought from experts rather than from non-experts or not at all.

Week 8 pairs this with Flynn and Lake for two worries that can keep an email in drafts: will they say no? and will they think less of me for asking? The studies examine different judgements; neither predicts the reply to a particular email.

The moderators help with choosing who to write to. Ask about the part that is genuinely hard, not the part you could have looked up. Ask the person, not the room. Ask the person who actually knows. These are experiments on perceived competence in work and decision-making tasks, not a study of university tutors.