The fear that produces the wrong behaviour

Most entrepreneurs avoid asking for advice from investors, advisors, peers, and team members because they believe the request will signal ignorance and lower the other person’s estimation of them. This fear is understandable, culturally reinforced, and consistently wrong.

Brooks, Gino and Schweitzer tested this across four studies in 2015, published in Managesment Science. Advice-seekers were rated as more competent than non-advice-seekers in every condition tested. The effect was robust across contexts, and the direction of it runs directly against the intuition that drives avoidance. Understanding why it works this way is the first step toward changing the behaviour the fear produces.

The flattery mechanism

When someone asks for advice, they send a specific social signal to the person they are asking: I believe you know something I don’t. That signal is a form of admiration — an implicit acknowledgement of superior knowledge, skill, or judgment. Many people receive this signal rarely. The advice-giver, having received it, responds not with a downward evaluation of the asker but with a warmer, more respectful assessment of someone who recognised their value.

This is why the competence boost operates through flattery rather than through the content of the advice itself. The effect does not depend on the quality of the advice exchanged. It depends on the social signal the request itself carries — and that signal is one of respect.

The Ben Franklin effect

Benjamin Franklin documented the underlying mechanism in his autobiography. He wanted to soften a political rival who disliked him. Rather than performing competence or seeking approval, he asked the man to lend him a rare book. The man complied. Afterward, he treated Franklin with noticeably more warmth — and Franklin recorded his observation that a person who has done you a service will be more readily inclined to do you another than someone you have obliged.

The psychological explanation is cognitive dissonance resolution. When a person does someone a favour, their mind seeks to justify the behaviour — and one of the most efficient justifications is concluding that they must like the person they helped. The act of helping produces the warm feeling toward the recipient, not the other way around. Asking for advice is a Ben Franklin request in its most natural form: it requests a favour, signals admiration, and generates the dissonance resolution that produces liking.

Jecker and Landy’s foundational 1969 experiment established one critical boundary condition. Students who had won money in a competition were asked for it back directly by the researcher, via a secretary, or not at all. Those asked directly liked the researcher the most. Those asked via an intermediary liked him the least — less than those who were never asked at all. The mechanism requires that the ask be personal and direct. An email sent by an assistant, a form, or a third-party introduction does not trigger the Ben Franklin effect. The psychological signal requires the asker to be visibly, personally present in the act of asking.

Why intellectual humility reads as confidence

The cultural assumption is that certainty signals competence and uncertainty signals its absence. The research on intellectual humility in leadership contexts consistently contradicts this. Leaders who acknowledge limitations, invite input, and ask questions are perceived as more trustworthy, not less authoritative. The mechanism is that performing certainty reads as image management — and people, including investors and team members, are reasonably good at detecting it. The person who asks for advice has demonstrated they are comfortable with the gap between what they know and what exists to be known. That comfort signals genuine confidence in a way that performed certainty cannot.

The applied implication for team culture extends the individual effect. The entrepreneur who asks for advice publicly and visibly creates permission for their team to do the same. One advice-seeking act at the leadership level removes the psychological barrier that prevents team members from contributing genuine thinking — because it signals that not knowing something is not a threat to standing in this organisation. The first act is relational, but the downstream effect is cultural and, over time, strategic.

The mentor relationship

Soliciting advice from investors, experienced entrepreneurs, and advisors is not only informational. The act of asking transforms a neutral or transactional relationship into one in which the advice-giver has made a psychological investment. That investment — of time, knowledge, and cognitive attention — produces warmth, advocacy, and continued engagement through exactly the same mechanism Franklin identified. The mentor who has given substantively to a mentee has, in resolving the cognitive dissonance of the act, generated positive regard for the mentee that did not exist before the request. The entrepreneur who never asks is not protecting their image. They are preventing the formation of the social bonds that make a professional network functionally valuable rather than merely extensive.

A book worth reading alongside this

Give and Take by Adam Grant is the most research-grounded treatment of why asking for help — including advice — is the behaviour most strongly associated with long-term influence in professional relationships. Grant’s research on how givers, matchers, and takers differ in their long-term trajectories directly predicts that advice-seeking, by activating the giver’s tendency to invest, builds relational capital that compounds over time in ways that neither transactional exchange nor performed self-sufficiency can replicate.

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This article is for educational and informational purposes only. Sources: Brooks, A.W., Gino, F. & Schweitzer, M.E. (2015), Management Science, 61(6), 1421–1435. Jecker, J. & Landy, D. (1969) — Ben Franklin effect foundational experiment. Franklin, B. (1791), The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin. Gao, C., Niu, A. & Yu, C. (2025), Frontiers in Psychology.