Advice given to one is better than advice given to many. Why? People feel more empathetic toward a single, identified, advice recipient, so they tend to put more care into the advice and behave less selfishly than they do if there are many recipients.
Sunita Sah, a post-doctoral associate at Duke University who worked on the research while completing her PhD with George Loewenstein, professor of economics and psychology at Carnegie Mellon University.
It turns out that in a learning task, people are guided more by advice at the start. Their genes determine how long it takes before they let the lessons of experience prevail.
Details are published in the Journal of Neuroscience. A new study finds that two brain regions have different takes on how incoming information should influence thinking.
The prefrontal cortex (PFC), the executive area of the brain and the striatum, buried deeper in the brain, is where people process experience to learn what to do
Michael Frank, assistant professor of cognitive, linguistic, and psychological sciences at Brown University
