Advice can change a life.
ADVICEdge is a long inquiry into the art and science of advice, and a home for the research on it.
How it began, New Delhi, January 2010A question from a student in spectacles
In January 2010, a group of broadcast journalism students at a college in New Delhi asked me to talk about what I had learned in television news. Instead, I spoke for twenty minutes about the role advice plays in a life: how the right person changes its direction, and how finding one takes time.
At the end, a young student in spectacles asked whether there was a way to choose who advises us. I did not have a clear answer for her. The question never left me.
Years later I interviewed three hundred people and a hundred families for my first book, Real Conversations In Digital Age. One sentence kept coming back in different words: if I had sat across a table from the man advising me, I would not have lost what I lost. My second book, The Only Difference, turned that sentence into a framework. ADVICEdge is where the work continues.
Ritu Kant Ojha
The premise
Advice is a conversation, and the oldest one we have
Advice is older than money. Long before there was anything to invest, somebody stood next to the person who had to decide, and the same problem has repeated ever since.
People have wrestled with it for as long as there have been decisions worth making, and the fundamentals have barely moved. What has changed is the noise around them. You can now be advised by a stranger on your phone at eleven at night, and by software that sounds more certain than most people ever do.
Four strands
What the inquiry studies
The old texts
Some of the oldest books we have are advice conversations: Krishna counselling Arjuna, Vidura counselling a sleepless king, Seneca writing to a younger friend. The inquiry reads them for what they say about who should be trusted, and when.
History
Courts, trading houses and families have always depended on counsellors, and history keeps a long record of what happened when they chose well or badly. From royal advisors to the Marwari trading houses and modern corporate collapses, the cases repeat.
Research
Psychologists have studied advice for decades: why we discount it, whom we believe, how a reputation forms and how quickly it breaks. The inquiry reads the studies, checks them, and translates them into plain language.
Where advice is going
Advice now reaches people through professionals, platforms, influencers and software, often all at once. The inquiry follows how each of these changes the trust between the person advising and the person deciding, and what keeps advice human.
Open questions
Questions we are exploring
- Why do people discount good advice, and trust the voice that agrees with them?
- How did the old traditions decide whom a ruler, a household or a merchant should consult?
- Why does the same sentence feel different when we believe a person said it?
- What happens to advice given across distance, when families decide from another country?
- Which parts of advising can a machine do well, and which depend on a person who is accountable?
- Can the qualities of a good advisor be taught, and measured?
Have a question we should be asking? Tell us.
Stay with the inquiry
Method
How the work is done
Primary sources first. Every quotation in the Library names its text, its passage and its translator (or says when the rendering is our own), and links to where you can read it in full. Every study is cited by its authors, journal and year, with its limits noted.
Data over hype. A finding goes on this site only with its source named and linked, and a claim that cannot be sourced is left out. Where researchers disagree, the disagreement is reported.
Conversations with the people who study advice. We invite academics, historians and practitioners to challenge the framework, and we will publish their corrections here. Readers are welcome to do the same.