Verified by 
Key points
- The assumption that advice from top experts will have unique effects on skill acquisition is common, yet incorrect.
- Being good at something is not the same as being good at teaching it.
- Knowledge is a necessary, but not sufficient, precondition to effective advice giving.
It is a curious feature of our university system that most professors are expected to carry a heavy teaching load despite having never studied teaching. Implicit in this arrangement is the assumption that expertise in a certain field—which university professors must demonstrate to get and keep their jobs—is sufficient qualification for teaching students about it. This logic appears intuitive: If we’re going to learn, we’re best to learn from the experts.
The tendency to assume that experts make good teachers has implications beyond the classroom. Advice giving is big business today, and big names in various fields are often most sought after for that purpose. Everybody wants to learn from the best. Companies such as Master Class center their whole pitch around this notion: Learn from the best experts. Indeed, who wouldn’t want to learn filmmaking from James Cameron; songwriting from Alicia Keys; writing thrillers from Dan Brown; or filmmaking from Martin Scorsese?
Yet on closer examination, this logic leaks. As college students everywhere will attest, many professors, while manifestly experts in their field, are flat-out bad teachers. Possessing knowledge or skill and teaching it to others are in fact two rather independent realms of experience. While knowledge is a necessary precondition to teaching—you can’t teach what you don’t know—it is an insufficient one: Knowing, and knowledge communication, are not one and the same. Being good at something is not the same as being good at teaching it. There are several reasons why top performers may not make the best teachers.
First, teaching requires explicit knowledge. You have to know how you’re doing what you’re doing, so you may explain it to others. Expert knowledge tends to be implicit, stored as a series of automatic habits that operate outside awareness, and may in fact be hindered by it. NFL fans know that when a coach calls a timeout before a crucial kick, they do so to “freeze” the kicker—that is, to make the kicker think about it—to interfere with the kicker’s automatic expert process.
Moreover, teaching involves other skills unrelated to that expertise, like patience, communication skills, and empathy—the ability to put yourself in the beginner’s shoes to figure out what would be useful to them. One’s ability to teach also depends heavily on their motivation level. Many of those who become top performers do so because they value performing much more highly than all other things, including teaching. You rarely get very good at something you don’t value. These are some of the reasons why few top athletes, for example, become top coaches.
So, does getting advice from top performers translate into unique performance benefits? Recently (2021) a team of researchers led by David Levari of Harvard Business School set out to explore this question in some detail. Their first study focused on examining whether indeed people expect top experts to be the best teachers. To that end, the researchers asked over a thousand participants to assess, using various methods, whether the performance of others in a word scramble game would predict the quality of their advice to novice players. The answer was yes across the board. More than half of the participants reported a preference for getting advice from top performers, expecting it to provide unique benefits.
Next, the researchers sought to find whether advice from top performers would actually improve novices’ performance more than advice from low-ranked or mediocre players. They assigned a group of participants (labeled, “advisors”; N=78) to play a word scramble game (shown to be a game of skill, not luck) and write advice on how to play it well. They then gave that advice to a new group of participants (the “advisees"; N=2085) and analyzed its impact on their performance.
Results showed that while the top-performing advisors believed their advice would help advisees best; while advisees rated advice from top-performing advisors higher; and while receiving advice did indeed improve advisees’ performance (compared to receiving no advice), the advisors’ performance (level of expertise) in fact had no effect on advisees’ performance.
“The advice from the best performers was helpful,” note the researchers, “but no more helpful on average than the advice from other performers.” In other words, participants in the study expected top performers to bring the best advice, and rated the advice of top performers as best, yet these beliefs and impressions did not translate into distinctly improved performance.
This presented a conundrum. Advisees in Study 2 rated advice from the best performers as better even though it was not in fact superior in terms of improving performance. Why would that be? What is it about the advice of top performers that advisees liked? Perhaps, the researchers hypothesized, top performers gave advice that felt better to implement.
A third study was conducted to explore this hypothesis. First, the researchers had a group of participants (N=298) play a round of the word scramble game and then rate different pieces of advice (collected from advisors in the previous study) about it for effectiveness. They found that advice from top performers was rated higher, even by players who were not given a chance to implement it.
So, top performers gave advice that sounded good, but not because it was easy to implement. What, then, was the quality that separated top performers’ advice from others? A fourth study found the answer. The researchers recruited and trained two independent “blind“ coders (that is, unaware of the study’s purpose and procedures) to rate the advice from study 2 advisors on various aspects of quality, including authoritativeness, (advice resented as declaration rather than suggestion), actionability (concrete rather than abstract advice), articulateness (fully formed, clear, error free sentences), obviousness (how basic or intuitive it was) and the number of ‘should’ vs. ‘should not’ suggestions (‘you should do this’ vs. ‘don’t do this’). Finally, coders also counted the number of discrete separate suggestions every advisor made.
The researchers then analyzed whether differences in any of these categories accounted for the difference in how top performers’ advice was rated. Indeed, a clear winner emerged: “the number of suggestions that a piece of advice contained had a strong and consistent effect on both its perceived-helpfulness score…and on its perceived-improvement score. In short, the more independent suggestions an advisor made, the more helpful and the more likely to produce improvement their advice was seen to be.”
The researchers conclude: “Participants in our studies preferred to receive advice from advisors who performed well. They expected that advice to be more helpful before they implemented it, and they believed it had been more helpful after they implemented it, despite the fact that they were told nothing about their advisor’s performance. These expectations and beliefs turned out to be wrong: Advice from the best-performing advisors was no more helpful than advice from any other advisors…In short, advice from the best performers was not better. It just sounded better because there was more of it.”
The authors note several limitations in their study, such as the fact that the sample used was not random, and the advice related to skill (how to do) and not to decision-making (what to do). Clearly, it is possible that in certain domain and certain situations top performers’ advice would prove superior. Yet, the authors conclude that “at least some ordinary situations in which ordinary people expect the best performing advisors to provide the best performance advice, those ordinary people are likely to be mistaken. Tips from the top are not always worth top dollar.”
In other words, when looking to learn skill X, you may be wise to consult a good teacher of skill X, rather than a skill X expert.
