This situation is all the more frustrating when the decision they reluctantly make turns out to be the wrong one.

An American study, published in the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, highlights an interesting paradox: people feel more culpable – or responsible for a fault or wrong – after following bad advice than when they trusted their own instincts.

Kaitlin Woolley, professor of marketing and communications management at Cornell University, and Dr Sunita Sah, associate professor of management and organisations at the same university, demonstrated this in a series of experiments.

One was an in-person experiment involving 200 volunteers, while the other four took place online, with up to 1,200 participants.

Among other things, the researchers asked participants to choose between two lotteries, one of which offered much more attractive prizes. Some received advice from a third party – who had no particular expertise – to opt for the less advantageous option.

As a result, those who followed this bad advice and obtained a small win (10 cents in most cases) experienced greater feelings of culpability than those who had made an independent decision.

Trusting your instinct

But why did they feel this way? When a person goes against their own judgment, they tend to have more thoughts about alternative scenarios and better decisions they could have made.

This thinking reinforces feelings of control over the situation, and consequently, the self-blame about having made a bad choice.

“If you have another person in the decision process, you would think that’s going to help spread the responsibility. And yet not only do people not blame the adviser more, they’re blaming themselves more,” explained Kaitlin Woolley in a news release.

This mechanism is not limited to trivial decisions such as a lottery. It could also apply to major life choices, such as a career change, a financial investment or a medical decision.

Sunita has previously demonstrated that individuals often followed bad advice, even when they were aware of its questionable nature. This new study explored the impact of these decisions in terms of regret, responsibility and blame.

“People often assume that following someone else’s suggestion will shield them from responsibility or regret. But in reality, the opposite happens. You end up feeling worse when you ignore what you knew was the better choice,” the researcher said.

So how can you avoid this trap?

According to the researchers, it’s crucial to find the confidence to listen to your instincts and to dismiss advice that doesn’t seem relevant.

It’s better to take full responsibility for your decisions than end up feeling needless self-blame after following the advice of an uninformed or unqualified third party.

However, it’s also important to assess your own level of expertise. Intuition develops with experience: the more you accumulate it, the quicker, surer and more natural your judgments become. Like any skill, it is honed with time and practice.