A word of advice - on advice

The U.S. is addicted to advice. Americans honestly believe that someone out there knows how to fix all our problems. Maybe Oprah. Maybe Dr. Phil. Maybe Barack Obama. Maybe Ayn Rand. Newspapers, magazines and television are filled with advice about health, finances, raising children, dieting. Don't smoke. Don't text on I-95. Don't allow your teenage son Vlad to disappear into his bedroom for the next decade. Exercise 30 minutes a day. Never buy stocks from men wearing ostrich-skin shoes.

Why, then, are so many of us miserable, bankrupt, overweight chain smokers with horrible, illiterate kids? The advice was out there. Why didn't we heed it? Oh why oh why?

After all the internet provides almost instant access to all sorts of advice on virtually any topic. (Well, that and the free porn.) If people have the right information in their hands, the Web's early evangelists proclaimed, they will make the right decisions. Things haven't worked out the way they hoped. People still smoke. People still text while driving. People still vote Republican.

"If diet books worked, why are there eight new dieting books each year?" asks a veteran of the magazine world. He was once told that 50% of the people who read fitness magazines never actually exercise. Buying a fitness magazine is like buying new workout clothing: It's a step in the right direction. This is what most advice-seeking is: a step in the right direction. Unfortunately, it just happens to be the opposite direction from the one in which most advice-seeker are headed.

Confirmation bias rules here: I will ask for your advice and continue to ask for it until you finally tell me that the stupid, counterproductive thing I have already decided to do shows that I possess the wisdom of Solomon. Please tell me that drinking even more tequila will make be a better poet. Please tell me that frequenting a bar where gangsters hang out is a good idea. Please tell me that, on balance, retiring to Bogota will probably give me the best bang for my buck. 

Asking for advice is a form of thinking out loud, except that it involves no thought. Goldberg, a Philadelphia-based psychologist observes: "When somebody says, 'You should do something,' the subtext is: 'You're an idiot for not already doing it.' Nobody takes advice under those conditions. But many people would rather be thought of as an idiot than do something they don't want to do. If someone suggests getting a high-paying job with Morgan Stanley when what you really want to do is to organize a peasant's revolt in the Yucatán, their advice, though judicious, is useless. Success on anyone's terms other than your own surely guarantees failure.

Now advice itself comes in many sizes and shapes. 

Typical is the nonexistent third-party advice, where one pretends that one is seeking advice for an unidentified friend. "I have a friend who gets drunk and wrecks speedboats every summer," the person says. "But he's too shy to ask for advice about changing his behavior. Got any ideas?"

Then there is also the Polonius-style advice ("A word to the wise"; "Take it from one in the know"; "Mark my words, young lady"); vicarious advice ("Now, if I were in your shoes") ; retroactive advice ("If you'd only asked me, I could have told you that pit bulls and Shih Tzus don't mix") and morally ambivalent advice ("Go ahead and take your kids swimming with sharks in the Maldives—see if I care"). Schadenfreudic advice overlaps with cracker-barrel medical advice in statements such as, "Have you thought about a rhinoplasty?" and "If I were you, I'd try liposuction—but then again, I'm not 200 pounds overweight."

How many of us actually take advice? Precious few. Just poll a few of your friends. Most also said that they hated being asked for advice because if the decision to take that job or marry that sociopath went south, they would get the blame. And who needs the extra aggravation.

Because I have grown children who aren't doing time and a car that runs, I am often asked for advice. I am constantly being approached by people who say, "You seem to know the ropes around here." I do. Or: "Now, you're a man of the world." I am. As such, I ceaselessly give advice to those who aren't men of the world, those who don't know the ropes. Rarely, though, do they ever take the advice offered.

Obviously, not all advice is equally useful. Advice untethered from a strategy for implementing it is feckless, merely annoying. It doesn't do any good to tell people with back problems to lose weight. They know that. They read that somewhere. Telling fat people that they should stop patronizing Mrs. Fields is like telling poor people to stop being poor. This is not really a lifestyle decision. This is the way things are.

Seeking advice you have no intention of following is a time-honored American tradition. It's a compulsory exercise before getting to the main event: doing something unbelievably stupid. It's a way of putting a patina of intelligence on a foolish, impulsive decision, making it seem like one iota of thought actually went into the decision to marry a woman named Galactica or invade Russia.

A similar dynamic is at work when one decides to make a sudden, life-altering and potentially disastrous career choice. You have already decided to do something self-destructive, but you want to feel good about it. So you get your conscience off your back by soliciting opinions from those in the know: well-traveled solons, revered village elders, sage guidance counselors. One of them suggests going to law school. Another says to open a trendy bistro in Brooklyn. Still another says to switch jobs and retrain as a speech therapist. But you have already decided to take a job as the night manager in a Transvaal bordello, so the advice these people give you was never under serious consideration. It's the equivalent of sealed municipal construction bids: You already know that you're going to give the contract to the mafia, but you solicit a bunch of other bids just to make it look good.

At some level people know that, unless the good word comes from McKinsey or Warren Buffett, most off-the-cuff advice is useless. Consider, for example, people who poke you in the chest and say, "A word to the wise." This expression makes no sense. If you are already wise, why would you need a word from anybody? It should be: a word from the wise. This is the whole problem. The word never comes from the wise. It always comes from an idiot.

One friend, a sociologist, suggested that a lot of people ask for advice because "It's the only way of remaining in your social circle, getting you to take their calls." In this sense, advice-seeking is a futile but emotionally rewarding social activity, like belonging to a Scottish Country Dancing club.

But you have to think of advice-seeking in a wider social context. Asking for advice is a way of engaging with other people, interacting with other people, while simultaneously putting off a difficult decision. But it's also a way of spreading responsibility so that if things go south, you have other people to blame. The human mind has the remarkable ability to suppress painful memories; otherwise none of us could go on. Think of Chernobyl. The Carter administration. The Bush Iraq venture. The Romney car elevator.

This is also the conclusion reached in a paper called "Taking Advice: Accepting Help, Improving Judgment and Sharing Responsibility" by Nigel Harvey and Ilan Fischer that appeared in the journal Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes in 1997. The more important a decision, they found, the more likely advice-seekers were to seek advice, thereby distributing the responsibility. For example, if you were going to arbitrarily close several lanes of the world's busiest bridge for a few days just to get back at a political rival, you might want to sound out a few colleagues before doing so. If only so they could take most of the heat. Or tell you, "No, I don't think that's such a good idea."

Good advice, once taken, is not eternally treasured either. Sooner or later, if you give a person a piece of breathtakingly good advice that changes their lives—say, by persuading them to stop dating Iraqi tank commanders—they will come back to punish you for it. If you tell someone to quit a job, sell a condo, write a book, make a movie, ditch a girlfriend or buy Apple at $7, and the decision turns out to be the right one, the day will come when your friend will not only deny that you ever gave them that advice but will spread rumors that you actually gave them exactly the opposite advice because you are an envious, brain-dead schmuck.

Sooner or later, everyone wants to be a self-made man or woman who would rather give advice than take it.