Source: Francesco83/Shutterstock

As a parent, I am often confronted with the hypocrisy of advice-giving. There are plenty of things I have recommended to my kids that represent courses of action I have not taken myself. Some of that is because I want my kids to avoid some of the mistakes I have made. But it also reflects that the way we give advice differs from the way we decide what to do ourselves.

An interesting paper in the February, 2015 issue of the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General by Sarah Helfinstein, Jeanette Mumford, and Russ Poldrack examined an important factor that leads our recommendations for others to differ from what we ourselves would do.

Participants were asked about a variety of risky behaviors across a number of domains including social risks (like moving away from family), recreational risks (like bungee jumping), financial risks (like betting a day’s wages at poker), safety risks (like driving without a seatbelt), and ethical risks (like not returning a wallet with a lot money in it). These were taken from a normed inventory called the DOSPERT.

Participants all rated the potential benefit, the potential cost, and the likelihood that they would incur the cost for each of these risky behaviors. They also rated how likely it was that other people engaged in these behaviors. Finally, they either rated their willingness to engage in that behavior themselves or their willingness to recommend the behavior to someone else.

Overall, people were not really more or less willing to engage in risky behaviors themselves than to recommend them to others. In some domains, like social and safety risks, people were more willing to perform the actions themselves than they were to recommend them to others. In other domains, like recreational and financial risks, people were less wiling to perform the actions themselves than to recommend them to others.

It is the determinants of these recommendations that are most interesting: People were more likely to perform an action and to recommend it when there was a perceived benefit in doing it—and less likely to perform or recommend it when there was a significant cost, and when that cost was seen as being likely to happen.

The major area where willingness to perform an action differed from the recommendations people made was in the influence of the likelihood that other people perform the action. When recommending an action to others, the likelihood that other people perform the action did not matter much. But engagement of other people increased people’s willingness to perform the action themselves. That is, people succumb to . When we perceive that other people are performing an action, it makes us more likely to perform it ourselves.

This tendency is true for decisions that do not involve risk as well. For example, studies of consumer products demonstrate that the leading brands in different product categories have remained relatively stable for a long time. Gillette has been the leading brand of razors and Tide has been the leading brand of detergent for over 50 years. Part of what helps brands like these maintain their dominance is their perceived popularity. Even without knowing it explicitly, we buy what we think other people are buying.

When you are contemplating a decision, then, it is worth asking yourself both what you are thinking of doing as well as what you might recommend to someone else. If you think that there is a difference between what you would do and what you would recommend, stop and think about whether you might be better off doing what you would recommend to someone else.

Follow me on Twitter and on Facebook and Google+.

Check out my new book Smart Change, and my books Smart Thinking and Habits of Leadership

Listen to my radio show on KUT radio in Austin, Two Guys on Your Head, and follow 2GoYH on Twitter and on Facebook.