Evaluating Experts May Serve Psychological Needs: Self-Esteem, Bias Blind Spot, and Processing Fluency Explain Confirmation Effect in Assessing Financial Advisors' Authority

摘要

When making financial decisions, people often use recommendations from professional advisors. However, before doing so, they must first recognize whether the experts to whom they turn for advice are competent and trustworthy. In the present article, we show that decision-makers ascribe greater authority to those financial advisors whose recommendations confirm their own opinions. We document that this confirmation effect in perceiving financial experts' authority holds for two financial products (investment accounts and health savings accounts) and three different cultures (United States, Poland, and the United Kingdom). Most importantly, we found that the effect might be due to three distinct psychological mechanisms: self-esteem, bias blind spot, and processing fluency. The results presented in this project indicate that receiving financial advice consistent with one's own beliefs (compared to advice inconsistent with those beliefs) is related to higher evaluations of one's own competence in finances, higher self-esteem, and perceiving advisors as less biased and with better processing fluency, which in turn lead to ascribing greater epistemic authority to financial experts.