The Impact Of Regulatory Fit On Advice-taking In Career Decision-making Process

Seeking advice is a basic practice for college students in CareerDecision-making Process. Past studies on advice taking mostly were based on thequality of advice, confidence, emotion and trust perspectives. However, littleresearch explored advice taking from motivation perspectives.Regulatory fit is a new motivation beyond pleasure and pain (Higgins,2000).People experience regulatory fit when the manner of their engagement in an activitysustains their goal orientation or interests regarding that activity. Fit is shown toinfluence judgments and decision making, attitude and behavior change, and thewillingness of acceptance for other’s advice. In this article, from motivationperspective, we took undergraduate students as subjects and adopt Judge-AdvisorSystem (JAS) to investigate the impact of regulatory fit on advice taking, anddiscuss boundary conditions of regulatory fit effect, as well as examine thepsychological processes that could account for regulatory effects. However,regulatory fit effects was affected by judge’s involvement.Study1took undergraduate student as samples, we conducted a2factorsbetween-group design by the combination of2(regulatory orientations:promotion/prevention)×2(advising strategies: desirable/vigilance) aim to explorethe impact of regulatory fit on advice taking. The results showed that people hadhigher level in advice-taking when the strategy of advice sustains their currentorientation.Previous studies found that regulatory fit effects were more likely to occurwhen people were not motivated to process information carefully (Wang&Lee,2006; Briley&Aaker,2006). However, such an implication seemed to becontradictory to the finding that people were more motivated when theyexperienced regulatory fit (Idson, Liberman,&Higgins2000). Therefore, stduy2took undergraduate student as samples, we conducted a2factors between-groupdesign by the combination of2(regulatory fit: fit/non-fit)×2(involvement: low/high)to explore the impact of regulatory fit and involvement on advice taking. There was an interactive effect between regulatory fit and involvement on advice-taking. To bespecific, people had higher level in advice-taking with fit under low-involvementcondition, however, it had no significance under high-involvement condition.The work on regulatory fit to date suggests that the experience of “feelingright” leaded to enhance processing fluency to more favorable of advice (Lee&Aaker,2004). However, regulatory fit effects were eliminated when the correctsource of feeling right was made salient before message exposure (Cesario, Grant,&Higgins,2004). Subsequently, Study3took undergraduate student as samples,we used a2(regulatory fit: fit/non-fit)×2(attributional types: attribution/non-attribution) between-group design to understand the mechanism of regulatoryfit effects. Preacher, Rucker, Hayes (2007) provided a guide to properly construeand conduct analyses of conditional indirect effects, commonly known asmoderated mediation effects. Appling these methods, we found that the indirecteffect of regulatory fit on advice-taking through processing fluency is moderated byattributional types.In brief,“feeling right” from regulatory fit have a positive effect on processingfluency. Therefore, when people experience regulatory fit they have higher level ofadvice-taking. However, involvement is one of the boundary conditions forregulatory fit effects. This impact of fit on advice-taking reflects a misattributioneffect that stems from people confusing the source of their ‘‘feel right’’ tocharacteristics of the target.