What is the best way to give advice? | Psychology Today

Mystical Limpet (Travis Greene): What is the best way to give advice? | Psychology Today

From Psychology Today:

A paper by Reeshad Dalal and Silvia Bonaccio in a 2010 issue of Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes looked at several different kinds of advice that people get and give to understand how likely people are to use them. They distinguished between four types of advice.

Advice for is a recommendation to pick a particular option.

Advice against is a recommendation to avoid a particular option.

Information supplies a piece of information that the decision maker might not know about.

Decision support suggests how to go about making the choice, but does not make a specific recommendation. …

… However, information was the most useful kind of advice across the studies. That is, people found it most helpful when people told them about aspects of the options that they might not have known about already.

Travis goes on to ask:

What implications does this finding have for evangelism? 

Great question! Related to supplying information also seems to be the role of reframing the question. (i.e., The lawyer asks Jesus, "Who is my neighbor?" Jesus tells the Good Samaritan parable and then reframes the question, "Who was neighbor to the man in need?")