To you I am listening: Perceived competence of advisors influences judgment and decision-making via recruitment of the amygdala

Abstract

Considering advice from others is a pervasive element of human social life. We used the judge-advisor paradigm to investigate the neural correlates of advice evaluation and advice integration by means of functional magnetic resonance imaging. Our results demonstrate that evaluating advice recruits the “mentalizing network,” brain regions activated when people think about others' mental states. Important activation differences exist, however, depending upon the perceived competence of the advisor. Consistently, additional analyses demonstrate that integrating others' advice, i.e., how much participants actually adjust their initial estimate, correlates with neural activity in the centromedial amygdala in the case of a competent and with activity in visual cortex in the case of an incompetent advisor. Taken together, our findings, therefore, demonstrate that advice evaluation and integration rely on dissociable neural mechanisms and that significant differences exist depending upon the advisor's reputation, which suggests different modes of processing advice depending upon the perceived competence of the advisor.

Keywords:

• Advice evaluation
• Advice integration
• Judge-advisor paradigm
• Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI)

Acknowledgments

The authors gratefully acknowledge the help with data collection provided by members of the Institute of Neuroscience and Medicine at the Research Centre Juelich, in particular Barbara Elghahwagi and Dorothe Krug. L.S. would also like to thank Anja Kassecker for her assistance during the recruitment of study participants, data collection, and analysis.

L.S. was funded by the Koeln Fortune Program/Medical Faculty, University of Cologne and by the Volkswagen Foundation. S.B.E. was funded by the Human Brain Project (R01-MH074457-01A1), the DFG (IRTG 1328) and the Initiative and Networking Fund of the Helmholtz Association within the Helmholtz Alliance on Systems Biology (Human Brain Model). A.M. was funded by the Volkswagen Foundation. K.V. was funded by the German Ministery of Research and Education (BMBF) and the Volkswagen Foundation.