by Emily Reynolds, The British Psychological Society
Imagine that you're faced with a big personal decision — who do you ask for advice? Some may choose to run things by friends, others a therapist, or maybe even anonymous online forums. You may prefer to go by gut feeling, by following your instinct, or to reason your way towards a solution using logic.
Despite this range of options, new research suggests that around the world, people tend to rely on themselves. Exploring the experiences of over 3500 participants from twelve countries (including two indigenous communities), a team led by Igor Grossmann has found that people prefer self-reliant strategies to work out what to do in a tricky situation, rather than leaning on the advice of others.
Participants included students, local community members, and members of Indigenous communities. Firstly, they were presented with a series of everyday decision-making scenarios that were relevant across cultures, ranging from choosing how to invest money, helping a neighbour, picking a university, or planning travel. Some scenarios required picking between two equally appealing options, such as deciding how to spend an unexpected windfall, while others involved balancing self-interest with the needs of others, such as choosing whether they would help a neighbour at their own cost.
For each scenario, participants were asked to evaluate four different decision-making strategies, two relying on their own thinking (gut feeling or careful deliberation) and two seeking advice from others (friends or the wider community). They indicated which strategy they would use, which they thought was the wisest, and which they believed most people in their culture would choose. Participants also rated how good each choice would make them feel.
After this, they completed questionnaires measuring their sense of self and whether they saw themselves as independent or defined through relationships with others, as well as their ability to problem-solve.
Across all cultures, people overwhelmingly preferred to rely on themselves rather than seek advice from others, ranging from 69% in China to 87% in Slovakia. The most popular strategy to do this was personal deliberation, using logic to make decisions, followed by gut feeling. Turning to friends or the wider community was far less common, a pattern which held across cultures. This was also the case when participants rated how good they felt each strategy would make them feel: self-reliant strategies were seen as significantly more satisfying and wise than advice-oriented ones.
Interestingly, while people generally expected that others in their culture might seek advice from others, this expectation didn't necessarily change their own preference for self-reliance. Cultural differences did appear: those who saw their cultures as more independent leaned more heavily on personal judgment, whereas more interdependent groups and those with stronger tendencies toward reflection and social consideration were slightly more open to advice. Still, even in these groups most favoured self-reliance.
The preference for self-reliance also held across different types of decisions: whether choosing between two attractive options or deciding between personal gain and helping someone else, people tended to discount advice. Social considerations, like potential reputational costs, made participants slightly less likely to seek advice in scenarios involving helping others, but the overall pattern of self-reliance remained strong. In short, across cultures, contexts, and decision types, people trusted their own judgment far more than the guidance of others. This is interesting, senior author Eduoard Machery points out in a press release, as receiving advice from others often leads to better decision-making.
The team ultimately argues that a preference for self-reliant decision-making is a universal human tendency shaped by both individual and cultural factors, challenging the assumption that cultural interdependence will necessarily favour advice-seeking. "One might think that if anything should vary across cultures and environments, it is preferences about how to make a decision, as decisions are arguably made quite differently across cultures. But that appears not to be the case," Machery said.
Future research could explore when and why people choose to seek the advice of others, providing further insight into the relationship between private deliberation, gut feeling, and the wisdom of crowds.
Read the paper in full:
Grossmann, I., Maksim Rudnev, Dorfman, A., Atari, M., Barr, K., Abdellatif Bencherifa, Buckwalter, W., Clancy, R. F., Dahua, G. C., Dahua, N. C., Deguchi, Y., Wilmer, A. L., Fabiano, E., Badr Guennoun, Halamová, J., Hashimoto, T., Homan, J., Kanovský, M., Kaori Karasawa, & Kim, H. (2025.) Decision-making preferences for intuition, deliberation, friends or crowds in independent and interdependent societies. Proc. R. Soc. B. 292(2052), 20251355–20251355. https://doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2025.1355
