Advising in the face of Constraints: How Resource Scarcity Shapes Advice-Giving

Abstract: The present work examines how perceived resource constraints shape advice-giving in the face of trade-offs between short-term needs and long-term goals. We find that advisors prioritize alleviating advisees’ material constraints over promoting long-term outcomes, leading to systematically different recommendations for constrained versus unconstrained individuals. Study 1 shows that working professionals are more likely to recommend short-term financial gains over long-term career advancement when advising low-income (vs. not low-income) students, driven by prescriptive beliefs about what constrained individuals should prioritize. Using an intertemporal tradeoff paradigm, Study 2 shows that while advisors push high-income advisees towards prioritizing greater long-term gains, they give low-income advisees recommendations that focus on short-term gains. Study 3 demonstrates that constrained advisees’ choices are more impacted by differences in advice, making advising differences consequential for downstream decisions. Together, these findings suggest that in the presence of constraints, differences in advice may lead to unintended consequences for advisee outcomes.

Keywords: advice-giving, tradeoffs, resource scarcity