I feel this way myself when unsolicited advice comes my way from various quarters, so Rob Henderson‘s unsolicited advice here is interesting:
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.
This is why advice giving can sometimes turn into a game of Why Don’t You — Yes But.
The advice giver says “Here is something I know that you don’t” and the listener says “Yeah, well here’s something I know that you don’t”.
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.
