The need to be wary of the motivations of those offering us advice

Decision-Making

Auditors provide a good example of this bias. One hundred thirty-nine professional auditors were given five different auditing cases to examine. The cases concerned a variety of controversial aspects of accounting. For instance, one covered the recognition of intangibles, one covered revenue recognition, and one concerned capitalization versus expensing of expenditures. The auditors were told the cases were independent of each other.

Every recommendation has an incentive standing somewhere behind it. Money is the obvious one, but status, loyalty, embarrassment and the desire to be invited back can pull just as hard. The auditors in this study needed no brown envelopes. Being assigned to the company made dubious accounting treatments look more acceptable than they did to auditors assigned to an outside investor. Professional expertise stayed in the room. The side they represented quietly rearranged what felt reasonable.

Sincerity offers little protection. A consultant can honestly believe the answer requires the service their firm sells. A team can assess its cherished project with tremendous care and still find every weakness temporary. A commission-paid adviser may genuinely like the customer while one product’s virtues keep arriving in unusually flattering light. Disclosure helps, although we treat it like a ceremonial washing machine: “I benefit if you agree; now my objectivity is clean.” In some cases, declaring the conflict can even grant permission to lean harder.

Different structures produce different temptations. Criteria written before the favourite appears are harder to bend around it. Diagnosis paid separately from implementation has less reason to discover an implementation-shaped emergency. Rejected alternatives kept on record cannot be rewritten as obviously foolish six months later. None guarantees truth. Each merely makes a flattering interpretation more expensive. The incentive still does not prove advice wrong; that shortcut is cynicism pretending to be sophistication. It reveals where the advice is likely to flex, and whose interests will supply the pressure.