Advice Response Theory: Understanding Responses to Relationship Advice

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As people go through their daily lives, they encounter decisions to be made and problems to be resolved. For example, you might need to decide on a phone carrier or a dentist, whether to visit distant family at the holidays, or how to pursue your ambitions after college. Or, you may be having problems with a class, a relationship, a living situation, or a health matter. Although you may handle some of these problems and decisions independently, you may also turn to others in your personal, social, and professional relationships for advice about what to do, or others may volunteer their advice to you. Advice, defined as recommendations about what to do, think, or feel in response to a situation (MacGeorge, Feng, & Thompson, 2008), is often viewed as a form of support or helping behavior (MacGeorge, Feng, & Burleson, 2011). However, advice is also a complex form of interpersonal persuasion or compliance-gaining (Wilson, 2002). Advice messages advocate actions for recipients to take, and the recipients have to choose whether or not to do what is being advised. Further, recipients often have to consider the potential consequences of rejecting or following advice. For example, if you ignore your friend’s advice to leave your housemate’s dirty dishes on her bed, your friend may be less willing to listen to your problems in the future, but you may (probably rightly) feel that this action will only escalate the conflict with your housemate.