Decision, Vol 12(4), Oct 2025, 356-389; doi:10.1037/dec0000269
Recent studies on how and when people rely on information generated by human experts or algorithms have produced mixed results. When choosing between the two sources of information or rating their expected accuracy, people often show systematic preferences depending on the task domain, preferring algorithms for more objective and quantitative tasks and humans for more subjective and qualitative tasks. Results also indicate people prefer hybrid advice, which combines both human and algorithmic inputs, to either source on its own across various domains. However, when judges are provided with unsolicited advice and tasked with updating their own prior independent judgments in judge advisor system experiments, this pattern of results often vanishes or even reverses. We attempt to reconcile these differences in two solicited judge advisor system geopolitical forecasting experiments in which judges must first solicit advice from their preferred advisor before deciding if and how to revise their forecasts. We find that the pattern of selection decisions remains consistent with prior research: People tend to choose hybrid advisors when they are available over either humans or algorithms on their own. However, we find no differences in how people revise their beliefs based on the advice source selected, and we find no benefit to accuracy when hybrid advice is available versus when it is not. We also find clear effects of imposing a cost on soliciting advice. When advice was made costly, people were both more judicious about soliciting advice and saw greater accuracy gains when they did solicit it. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved)