Advice

This Article seeks to resurrect an ancient technology for enhancing the welfare of others: peer advice. For decisions as variable as whether to eat a marshmallow or which dialysis treatment to undergo, advice-giving is a powerful and as-yet-unrecognized debiasing tool. In fact, it is one of the most comprehensive and effective debiasing tools ever studied. People who succumb to motivated reasoning, hyperbolic discounting, and a host of other biases offer advice that is untainted by them.

When advising others, we are more creative, process information and probability more rationally, and see the forest rather than the trees. Far from the blind leading the blind, our friends and family see us and our situation far more clearly than we do. Currently, peer advice is an entirely untapped resource. Promoting, incentivizing, or even sometimes mandating advice can help us improve our decision-making in numerous contexts such as consumer contracts, health care, education, and financial planning.