Study shows most people make tough decisions alone, refusing advice from others

We like to think we are good listeners. Yet when choices get complicated, most of us quietly look inward and make the call ourselves. That is the striking pattern in a new cross-cultural study

Researchers compared four decision routes and found self-reliant strategies were preferred and judged wisest across 12 countries and 3,517 adults.

The finding matters because teams, families, and communities often assume that cultures differ mainly by how much they lean on others.

The data point in a different direction, showing a shared human tendency that societies tune rather than flip.

People prefer deciding alone

The project was led by Dr. Igor Grossmann in the Department of Psychology at the University of Waterloo, working with collaborators worldwide.

His team set out to see which route people actually favor when multiple avenues are offered side by side.

“Realizing that most of us instinctively ‘go it alone’ helps explain why we often ignore good counsel, be it for health tips or financial planning, despite mounting evidence that such counsel may help us make wiser decisions,” said Dr. Grossmann, first author on the paper.

In decision science, the advice-discounting bias describes this habit of underweighting input from others, even when that input could improve accuracy.

Laboratory work has shown again and again that people give their own view more weight than an adviser’s estimate, a pattern documented in classic judge-advisor experiments.

How people use advice

Participants confronted everyday dilemmas and chose among four strategies: intuition, private deliberation, friends’ advice, or the wisdom of crowds, which relies on aggregating independent judgments.

The design let researchers test preferences directly rather than infer them from one method alone.

Importantly, the wisdom-of-crowds route is most effective when individual estimates remain independent, a condition that weakens once people see one another’s answers.

Experiments show that even mild social influence can erode crowd accuracy by narrowing opinion diversity.

Culture changes self-reliance slightly

Researchers also measured self-construal, the way people think about the self as independent or interdependent, a foundational idea in cultural psychology. This lens helps explain why the same default can surface for different reasons in different places.

The paper reports that people and places scoring higher on independent self-views leaned more strongly toward self-reliance, while interdependent contexts softened the tilt without reversing it.

That refinements like this matter is no surprise given how much behavioral science has long relied on WEIRD samples that are not representative of the world at large.

Why people avoid advice

There are practical reasons people may hesitate to ask for guidance, beyond ego.

In settings with lower relational mobility, where relationships are stable and networks tight, seeking advice can signal neediness, impose obligations, or reveal private information.

Studies of relational mobility help explain how such social costs vary by context.

On the flip side, those who enjoy thinking for its own sake often prefer to puzzle things out. Psychologists describe this trait as “need for cognition,” the tendency to engage in and enjoy effortful thought, which shapes how people approach complex choices.

History shaped self-reliance

Human preference for self-reliance may also have deep roots in our evolutionary past. Anthropologists note that in small, pre-agricultural societies, quick individual judgments were often essential for survival, whether deciding when to flee from danger or seize a fleeting opportunity.

Over time, these tendencies could have become ingrained, favoring those able to make confident calls without waiting for group consensus.

Historical records also show that many cultures celebrated figures who embodied independent judgment, from ancient Greek philosophers to Indigenous leaders navigating unfamiliar colonial pressures.

This long-standing social value placed on autonomy likely reinforces modern instincts to trust one’s own reasoning before seeking outside input.

People work better with private advice

The pattern is clear: people want a beat to think before they trade notes. That suggests a simple, humane design choice for meetings and project sprints, namely, give individuals a window for private reasoning, then gather the best of that work.

“This knowledge can help us design teamwork better by working with this self-reliant tendency and letting employees reason privately before sharing advice that they might reject,” said Dr. Grossmann.

Teams can also preserve the benefits of crowd input by keeping early rounds independent and anonymous. Independence protects diversity of thought, which is the raw material crowds need to perform well.

Limits on how people use advice

Every survey has boundaries. The authors emphasize that their scenarios were standardized and the samples, while diverse, were not nationally representative, so field studies will be essential to test how these preferences play out when real stakes are on the table.

Still, the central result reframes a common assumption without taking anything away from the value of good counsel.

Knowing that most people start alone helps explain why advice so often bounces off, and it points to a kinder fix that meets people where they are.

The study is published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences.

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