How to Avoid Bad Advice

My friend has a business that paints house numbers on the sidewalk. When he first started, he tried flyers, cold calling, and selling door to door. Nothing boosted his business.

One day he had an idea: a flyer depicting a fireman talking to a woman with the caption, “In case of fire, a legible house number on the sidewalk helps us find your house faster.”

Within a few weeks, business was booming. My friend’s new flyer tapped into people’s tendency to trust expert opinion. In their minds, firemen are experts, and here a fireman was recommending that they get their sidewalks painted with the house number.

Marketing companies use this type of campaign to influence us to think we are making better decisions, but in fact, they are exploiting our cognitive blind spots: in many cases (including this one), the advice giver wasn’t an expert.

Expert Versus Non-Expert

An expert is someone who becomes knowledgeable in a specific area by studying that area extensively, or by having experience and training in it. An expert opinion gives you some reason to think that a claim is true, but a non-expert opinion doesn’t.

The problem is that people often aren’t very careful about checking whether or not the source they’re trusting is an expert. One of the pitfalls of the…