November is the month for giving thanks, but today I’m going to focus on another kind of giving: the kind of giving you do when someone asks for your advice. At first blush, offering words of wisdom probably seems like a selfless act. But research I’ll highlight in today’s featured Q&A shows that offering advice doesn’t just help the person you advise. It can often help you — the advice giver — achieve more, too.
Before I unpack how that could be and how it’s been proven, here are some other tidbits you might enjoy.
Recommended Listens and Reads
How We Judge What Feels “Fair:” On a recent episode of Choiceology, I interviewed economics Nobel Laureate Richard Thaler about how our perceptions of what’s fair depend on what we’ve become accustomed to and why that matters.
Making Good Decisions: Annie Duke, the best-selling author and former professional poker player, published an excellent book last month called How to Decide: Simple Tools for Making Better Choices. I interviewed Annie about what inspired the book and its key takeaways for Knowledge@Wharton.
Why the 2016 Election Feels Like 1,000 Years Ago: On the eve of the 2020 election, I spoke with The Atlantic about why the 2016 election feels so far in the past and why cyclical events like elections can prompt us to think about where we’ve been and where we’re headed.
Q&A: How Coaching Others Helps You Improve, Too
Today I’m sharing an interview I conducted for Choiceology with Penn psychology Professor Angela Duckworth and her former student, Lauren Eskreis-Winkler (now a post-doctoral scholar at the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business). Angela and Lauren describe how, in giving advice, we unearth insights and unlock motivation that can help us achieve our own goals.
Me: Angela, can you tell us where the idea to study this came from?
Angela: Well, the credit for the idea of advice-giving really goes to Lauren. We were studying grit and she came to me with the idea that if you want people to be gritty you should get them to give advice to other people about how to be gritty.
It was counterintuitive because you don't tell people any new information. You don't give them any tips or hacks. You just tell them to give other people advice. The idea that people could unlock information or wisdom inside themselves without being given anything, and then improve their motivation and performance, I thought was really intriguing.
Me: That’s really interesting. Lauren, could you describe how you’ve studied this?
Lauren: The intervention that had the most impressive effects raised kids’ grades. It was just one 8-10 minute session in which we said, “We think you have a lot of knowledge that you could share with somebody else.”
It was a really brief exercise where we asked them questions like, “How would you avoid procrastinating?” and “Can you write a note to another student who’s struggling to do better in school?” There were some multiple-choice questions like “What’s the most effective place to study?” This incredibly brief intervention seems to have had long-term effects.
Angela: Giving advice improved these kids’ motivation in school. The generality of the effect is what I find most intriguing. We found that advice-giving helps kids, and we found that it helps smokers trying to quit smoking.
What’s more, we didn’t find a huge amount of, ‘Oh, advice-giving works for this subgroup, but not for that subgroup.’ Many of the behavioral interventions that have been found to work only work on a certain subgroup of people. That we didn’t find this for advice-giving suggests to me that we can all benefit. There's that adage, ‘Do as I say, not as I do,’ but maybe it's really that when I say to do something in a certain way, I follow suit.
Me: Why do you think advice-giving changes our behavior?
Lauren: So, in the act of giving advice, you have to think really specifically about what to do. You might even have to form a specific plan to advise somebody else. And so we think that might be what’s going on—that students or people in the workplace, they didn’t think hard about what they know and put it into concrete suggestions until our intervention forced them to do that.
It’s also possible that when you give advice, it’s totally customized to you. And so this allows every person to customize advice and remind themselves about what works best for them.
Angela: Let me give an example: Say I give you advice about not procrastinating on your writing, and I say, "You know, Katy, one thing that really helps me is if I break a big goal into little goals or even tiny goals like, "Work on this paper for one minute." That's a goal anybody could do.
When I share that piece of advice with you: Well, for one thing, I’ve now done a little bit more processing and reflection than if you hadn't asked me for my advice. Secondly, I've drawn attention to the things that are under my control.
It's in the nature of advice-giving that we focus on things other people can change. And in so doing, of course, we're also focusing on things we ourselves can change.
And actually, that gets to a very related mechanism: confidence. When I give you advice about how you can do better, I indirectly motivate myself. I increase my own confidence in part, I think, because I've realized, ‘Oh, these are things that I have control over as opposed to things I don't have control over.’
Finally, there's a matter of cognitive dissonance. So if I advise you to break big goals into smaller goals and to not procrastinate, then the next time my own deadline looms and I end up watching reruns of Games of Thrones instead of doing my work, I’ll experience dissonance. It’s very uncomfortable having said one thing and then engaging in the exact opposite behavior.”
Me: So, Angela, how can people use this insight about advice-giving to improve their own decisions?
Angela: Let me tell you how I’ve used it. I have two daughters. They're teenagers. Like a lot of kids their age, they have a lot of pressure in school and, recently, I could see an episode of high stress and anxiety unfolding. With just the gentlest of prompts, I encouraged one of my daughters to give advice to the other about how not to be stressed out about a disappointing grade.
The daughter who gave the advice told her sister, ‘I know it really seems like the end of the world, but if you look at your final grade, it's not that bad. Maybe it's a good thing to not have everything perfect so that when we go to college we don't freak out over the first bad thing that happens.’ And I could see the ripple. I sensed that being the therapist and not the patient gave my older daughter her own perspective and a little confidence about managing the stresses in her own life.
I think there's a lesson here for leadership. If you want the weakest person on your team to improve, your impulse would probably be to shower them with advice, and that's not entirely the wrong move, because they might need to know things that they don't know. But I wonder what the effect would be if you take that weak link on your team and ask them to mentor a new person. What we might unlock there is a confidence that had previously not been realized and intuitions that had not been carried out.
In terms of helping ourselves, one thing is just to be reminded that we actually know things that we're not using. So if I’m struggling with a problem, I could hypothetically ask myself, ‘Well, if it were Katy who was struggling, what would I say to her?’”
If you want to learn more about how offering advice to others can help you achieve your own goals, listen to the episode of Choiceology about the power of your own advice. If you want to learn more about grit, check out Angela's book Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance.
This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
That’s all for this month’s newsletter. See you in December!
Katy Milkman, PhD
Professor at Wharton and host of Choiceology, an original podcast from Charles Schwab