People really don’t like being told what to do.
They especially don’t like when someone they view as equal to or lower status themselves tells them what to do (one reason why status ambiguity gives rise to conflict).
Advice, of course, is not the same as issuing orders. When you give advice, it feels like you are just trying to help. But for many people, when you hear advice, you conflate it with directives. Not, “Here’s what you should do” but “Do this, or else.”
Why do people react this way to unsolicited advice? After all, from the perspective of the giver, it usually comes from a place of genuine concern and desire to help.
In some cases, unsolicited advice can be thinly veiled assertions of dominance, one-upmanship, or distrust.
When some people say, “Here’s what you should do” sometimes what they really mean is “I’m better than you because I know this piece of information.” They aren’t necessarily cognizant that this is their goal, but they feel a sense of pleasure when others accept their suggestion. Unsolicited advice-giving can be a form of vying for dominance under the guise of being helpful. People resist it.
Listeners unconsciously sense that dominance is the goal of the unsolicited advice-giver. And then feel resentment toward them. This feeling of resisting dominance might surface in the listener’s mind as something like, “Why is this person trying to tell me what to do?” Again, this is particularly likely to be the case when the listener views the unsolicited advice-giver as someone of equal or lower social rank to themselves.
This gets to the key reason why we dislike unsolicited advice: Our desire to retain our freedom.
As I’ve written about here and here, anthropological and sociological evidence indicates that generally speaking, people detest constraints on their freedom. Hunter-gatherer communities hate all forms of dominance. Hunter-gatherers generally believe it is wrong to coerce a person into doing what the person doesn’t want to do. They seldom even make direct suggestions, because it might sound like coercion.
Interestingly, though, despite having no formal legal penalties for misconduct, gossip and the possibility of reputation destruction still give rise to strict behavioral norms for these small-scale societies. Nevertheless, any attempt by another member of the community to exert dominance is usually met with swift mocking, disapproval, laughter, and, in extreme cases, ostracism or execution. Perhaps people can accept abstract rules in the form of local norms and legal codes. But if it has a human face, if an individual directly tries to tell us what to do, we are naturally inclined to resent it.
The psychologist Peter Gray has suggested that people seem to resent unsolicited advice more when it comes from loved ones. When strangers give us unsolicited advice, it doesn’t feel like a constraint on our autonomy, because we don’t care about pleasing them. But when loved ones give advice, it often does feel like a constraint, because we don’t want to upset them by ignoring their counsel.
People have a strong desire to please loved ones. It feels difficult to ignore their advice, because of the implicit fear that if you do, it will indicate a lack of love or respect. “If I don’t listen to their advice, they’ll think I don’t care about them.”
So you’d rather not hear it. Because unsolicited advice from those you care about puts you in a bind: you can ignore it, which makes you look like you don’t care about them; or obey it, which we naturally dislike because it violates our desire for autonomy. By complying, it can feel like relinquishing a bit of social standing, relative to the advice giver. Momentarily, it feels like they are in control of us.
This conflict, between complying (which shows our love and respect for the person) and not complying (which reaffirms our freedom) leads to frustration. This is why we feel more upset when a family member or close friend gives us unsolicited advice compared to when a total stranger does it.
When I first joined the military, I was stunned at how quickly my life had improved. I would sometimes suggest it to my high school friends. Out of five close friends, four told me to fuck myself. And one reluctantly enlisted six years after I first recommended it. After his enlistment, he now works part-time at a restaurant and is still enrolled in community college (“I’m gonna transfer to a four-year college next term” he’s been telling me for years). But he’s doing better than my other high school friends.
When I got into college, I told all the junior enlisted guys I worked with that I’d help them with their college applications. Three guys expressed interest. I followed up with them as the deadlines approached, and each said they were no longer interested.
A while back I wrote, “Don’t give unsolicited advice” in a list of lessons I’ve learned. I’ll amend it to: “Don’t give unsolicited advice to those closest to you.” Of course, if they come to you asking for guidance, then by all means—give it.
And if you want to share your knowledge with strangers (like I sometimes do), then go ahead. It doesn’t put potential listeners in that bind between love for you and autonomy for themselves.
Still, be aware that some of those strangers will get angry with you. Because to them, your suggestions will feel like coercion.
Working with addiction, I've seen unsolicited advice trigger the fight, flight, freeze responses. It makes sense. For the addicted person their body has developed a tolerance and taking the substance away would cause a very unpleasant rupture in their homeostasis. It can feel life threatening.
By analogy, any unsolicited advice is a threat to a person's current situation. It feels less scary to have your hands on the wheel during a change in direction than to turn things over to someone who doesn't have your instincts for self preservation.
Thank you Rob, for this good advice.😉