A study published in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin offers insight into why people are reluctant to share advice with others who are older than them.
Despite the fact that young people have distinct expertise to offer the older generation (e.g. technology skills), it is typically expected that advice is transferred from an older person to a younger person — and not the other way around.
Study authors Ting Zhang and Michael S. North suggest that because of these biases, people may overlook opportunities to gain advice from younger people and, consequently, miss out on learning experiences. Similarly, young people may avoid sharing their insights with older others.
“This research was born out of a classroom experiment that involved MBA students teaching their newly-minted negotiation skills to those who had not received any training on the topic,” said Zhang, an assistant professor at Harvard Business School.
“We noticed that instructors who taught someone older were more doubtful about their effectiveness in teaching the material, even though these doubts were unfounded. The older students on the receiving end found their younger instructors to be, in fact, quite effective. We found similar patterns across a variety of different organizations. Younger employees in reverse mentoring dynamics—when junior employees mentor senior employees—experienced the same doubts about their contributions.”
“Through these discussions, we realized how deeply ingrained the old adage “older is wiser” is in our beliefs. We wrote this paper to highlight how knowledge can reside in all areas, even amongst younger individuals, and that younger people often times underestimate how their knowledge can be an asset.”
Zhang and North conducted a series of studies to explore how younger individuals’ advice-giving is perceived both by the young advisers themselves and by those receiving their advice.
In the first study, adults were offered the chance to share their expertise with someone 10 years younger, 10 years older, or the same age as them (subjects could select more than one group). While 69% elected to give advice to someone younger and 52% chose to give advice to someone within their age range, only 18% chose to advise someone older than them. This finding demonstrates the general tendency for people to give advice to those younger than them.
In three additional studies, the researchers compared advisers’ ratings of how effective they felt at giving advice, to advisees’ ratings of the advice they received. All three studies showed that advisers underestimated their effectiveness at giving advice to a greater extent when they were advising older people, compared to when they were advising younger or same-age others. This held true whether the advice was in a domain of their choosing or a topic chosen by researchers.
Finally, a fifth study showed that asking participants to contemplate how their advice might be helpful to an older person – prior to giving any advice – increased their confidence in how effective their advice would be. Additionally, it increased advisers’ confidence in how well their advice would be received. The researchers say, “removing these self-imposed barriers to reverse advising provides individuals access to more opportunities to advise and learn in all possible directions.”
“Just because someone may be younger does not mean that they lack relevant knowledge, skills, or wisdom. Younger people can be very effective at advising and teaching others, and often times, these younger individuals are not even aware themselves of what they can contribute,” Zhang said.
As the researchers point out, these studies offer something new to the concept of ageism. They say, “we demonstrate a unique challenge of feeling relatively younger . . . The current findings open new lines of inquiry concerning prejudices targeting the young and their self-handicapping consequences, demonstrating that internalized ageism is not merely an older adult challenge.”
Among other suggestions, the authors propose that future studies explore how perceptions surrounding reverse advising might change depending on whether the advice is solicited or unsolicited.
“When people think about reverse mentorship, they immediately think about technology, which younger people are perceived to be more adept. But our findings go beyond technology. A lot of the advice that younger individuals gave in our studies spanned many different topics, ranging from advice about negotiations to life advice. These studies inform us how much we could all be learning if we pushed aside conventional thinking about where knowledge resides,” Zhang said.
The study, “What Goes Down When Advice Goes Up: Younger Advisers Underestimate Their Impact”, was authored by Ting Zhang and Michael S. North.
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