scholarly journals Why Do People Give Less Weight to Advice the Further it is from Their Initial Opinion?

2010 ◽  
Author(s):  
Francesco Ravazzolo ◽  
Øistein Røisland
Keyword(s):  
2001 ◽  
Vol 23 (1) ◽  
pp. 61-74 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Charles Hatfield

Prior studies report that less experienced staff accountants are often susceptible to confirmation bias in the evaluation of evidence. This bias results in nonobjective information evaluation by staff-level accountants. This study examines how the perceived objectivity of the staff accountant and the manager's own client advocacy affect the manager's use of the staff accountant's research report when formulating client recommendations. The results suggest that objectivity judgments made by partner-/manager-level accountants are influenced by whether the staff accountant's research report confirms their initial opinion. Further, the confirmatory nature of the research report affects the manner in which the report is incorporated into a client recommendation. Nonconfirming research reports were given more weight than confirming research reports. Preference for client-favorable outcomes was found to affect the weight given to staff accountant research reports as well.


2011 ◽  
Vol 112 (1) ◽  
pp. 63-66 ◽  
Author(s):  
Francesco Ravazzolo ◽  
Øistein Røisland
Keyword(s):  

2008 ◽  
Vol 19 (04) ◽  
pp. 549-555 ◽  
Author(s):  
HONG-JUN LI ◽  
LU-ZI LIN ◽  
HE SUN ◽  
MING-FENG HE

In 2000, Sznajd-weron and Sznajd introduced a model for the simulation of a closed democratic community with a two-party system, and it is found that a closed community has to evolve either to a dictatorship or a stalemate state. In this paper, we continued to study on this model. All the neighboring individuals holding the same opinion is defined as a team, which will influence its nearest neighbor's decision and realize the opinion evolution. After some time-steps, a steady state appeared and the stalemate state in original model is eliminated. Moreover, the demand of time-steps has decreased dramatically. In addition, we also analyzed the effect of the various dispersal degree of the initial opinion on the opinion converging at the probability of one steady state. Finally we analyzed the effect of noise on convergence and found that the ability of anti-noise was increased about 1000 times compared with Sznajd model.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jack B. Soll ◽  
Asa B. Palley ◽  
Christina A. Rader

Much research on advice taking examines how people revise point estimates given input from others. This work has established that people often egocentrically discount advice. If they were to place more weight on advice, their point estimates would be more accurate. Yet the focus on point estimates and accuracy has resulted in a narrow conception of what it means to heed advice. We distinguish between revisions of point estimates and revisions of attendant probability distributions. Point estimates represent a single best guess; distributions represent the probabilities that people assign to all possible answers. A more complete picture of advice taking is provided by considering revisions of distributions, which reflect changes in both confidence and best guesses. We capture this using a new measure of advice utilization: the influence of advice. We observe that, when input from a high-quality advisor largely agrees with a person’s initial opinion, it engenders little change in one’s point estimate and, hence, little change in accuracy yet significantly increases confidence. This pattern suggests more advice taking than generally suspected. However, it is not necessarily beneficial. Because people are typically overconfident to begin with, receiving advice that agrees with their initial opinion can exacerbate overconfidence. In several experiments, we manipulate advisor quality and measure the extent to which advice agrees with a person’s initial opinion. The results allow us to pinpoint circumstances in which heeding advice is beneficial, improving accuracy or reducing overconfidence, as well as circumstances in which it is harmful, hurting accuracy or exacerbating overconfidence. This paper was accepted by Yuval Rottenstreich, judgment and decision making.


2008 ◽  
Vol 19 (06) ◽  
pp. 867-873 ◽  
Author(s):  
LONG GUO ◽  
XU CAI

In this paper, we analyze the average magnetization and spatial correlation of opinion formation in small-world network and in the regular lattice. We construct NW small-world network through adding shortcuts on the regular lattice. With computer simulation, we find that there exists short- and long-range spatial correlation of the average magnetization m(t) in NW small-world network and the evolution trend of opinion is dependent on the initial opinion condition by comparing with that in regular lattice. On the other hand, we analyze the average magnetization m(t) using the time series analysis, and find the Hurst exponent H ≃ 0.5 in NW small-world network and H = 0 in regular lattice. All the results show the important role of shortcuts in the NW small-world network, which reflects some interesting aspects in our real society indirectly.


2003 ◽  
Vol 43 (3) ◽  
pp. 207-214 ◽  
Author(s):  
Philippe Lunetta ◽  
Gordon S Smith ◽  
Antti Penttila ◽  
Antti Sajantila

Drowning is one of the leading causes of death when the manner of death remains undetermined. In the present study, we examined the epidemiological and medico-legal profile of 276 undetermined deaths (M:F = 3.4:1; mean age 41.9 ± 16.0 SD) among 1,707 consecutive bodies found in water and autopsied at the Department of Forensic Medicine, University of Helsinki, from 1976 to 2000. We also describe the differences between the police investigator's initial opinion and the forensic pathologist's death certification, and the different approaches among forensic pathologists when determining the cause of death. There was considerable variation among individual pathologists in the percentage of deaths considered undetermined but these differences were not significantly related to their level of training. Medico-legal training should focus on a standardised diagnostic approach to borderline cases, in which essential factors in determining the manner of death are often ambiguous.


2011 ◽  
Vol 37 (1) ◽  
pp. 9-27 ◽  
Author(s):  
Guang Qiu ◽  
Bing Liu ◽  
Jiajun Bu ◽  
Chun Chen

Analysis of opinions, known as opinion mining or sentiment analysis, has attracted a great deal of attention recently due to many practical applications and challenging research problems. In this article, we study two important problems, namely, opinion lexicon expansion and opinion target extraction. Opinion targets (targets, for short) are entities and their attributes on which opinions have been expressed. To perform the tasks, we found that there are several syntactic relations that link opinion words and targets. These relations can be identified using a dependency parser and then utilized to expand the initial opinion lexicon and to extract targets. This proposed method is based on bootstrapping. We call it double propagation as it propagates information between opinion words and targets. A key advantage of the proposed method is that it only needs an initial opinion lexicon to start the bootstrapping process. Thus, the method is semi-supervised due to the use of opinion word seeds. In evaluation, we compare the proposed method with several state-of-the-art methods using a standard product review test collection. The results show that our approach outperforms these existing methods significantly.


2004 ◽  
Vol 15 (06) ◽  
pp. 767-774 ◽  
Author(s):  
MINGFENG HE ◽  
QI SUN ◽  
HAISHAN WANG

We propose a mechanism of opinion evolution in a closed system. The opinion evolution process can be described as the disposal of multi-information inputs with one opinion accepted as the output. We introduce the opinion neutrality in the system, observing the characteristics of the opinion evolution process; and find that the initial opinion distribution fractions play an important role in the final results. When the two opposite opinions' fraction are equal, the neutrality fraction will affect the final opinion distribution dramatically.


1992 ◽  
Vol 43 (3) ◽  
pp. 372-395 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stuart Airlie
Keyword(s):  

Count Gerald of Aurillac (855–909) might seem rather out of place in a gallery of medieval saints: an aristocratic warrior, a great lord, Gerald seemed very much a man of this world rather than a saint in ascetic withdrawal from it. This was also the initial opinion of his biographer, who is, as far as this article is concerned, effectively his maker since we shall be dealing only with the ‘textual’ Gerald and not the historical one. This biographer, no less a figure than Abbot Odo of Cluny (879–942), began hisVitaof Gerald (c. 930) by saying that many people doubted that Gerald was a saint. The opening words of Odo'sPraefatioare quite explicit and perhaps rather surprising: ‘many people tend to doubt whether what is said about the blessed Gerald is true. And quite a lot of these people say that these stories are not only not true but fantastic.’ Originally Odo himself had not been too certain of Gerald's saintliness, though by the time he came to write the Vita he was convinced enough.2 The problem lay in convincing others.


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