Consumer Trust and Advice Acceptance: The Moderating Roles of Benevolence, Expertise, and Negative Emotions

Abstract

I explored advice acceptance for high-stakes decisions (i.e., those with subjectively important and risky outcomes), focusing on the relative influence of two components of consumer trust—benevolence and expertise—as well as perceived emotional decision difficulty. Participants solicited advice from experts when their decisions were low in perceived emotional difficulty but favored the advice of predominantly benevolent providers when making highly emotionally difficult decisions. Although consumers who faced emotionally difficult decisions were willing to trade off expertise for benevolence, they did not perceive this non-normative trade-off to influence decision quality. Instead, the results support a “stress buffering” effect whereby consumers were more confident in the accuracy of predominantly benevolent providers’ advice.