https://doi.org/10.1177/0146167220905221 Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 1–17 © 2020 by the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, Inc Article reuse guidelines: sagepub.com/journals-permissions DOI: 10.1177/0146167220905221 journals.sagepub.com/home/pspb Empirical Research Paper Common wisdom suggests that older is wiser (Grossmann et al., 2012). When we seek advice and knowledge, we typi- cally go to someone older with more wisdom and expertise (Bonaccio & Dalal, 2006; Feldon et al., 2011; Rader et al., 2017; Schaerer et al., 2018). These tendencies reinforce our intuition that expertise, wisdom, and advice flow from older individuals to younger ones. Consequently, we overlook opportunities in which advice stemming from expertise and wisdom flows in the opposite direction: from younger to older individuals. Nevertheless, younger individuals—despite their relative youth—have unique insights to offer based on their own relative expertise. For example, due to the rapid pace of tech- nological change, younger generations often adopt unique cutting-edge knowledge more quickly, providing unprece- dented opportunities for younger generations to teach older generations (North & Fiske, 2012; Twenge, 2006). In some cultures (e.g., Eastern cultures), younger individuals are associated with greater use of wise-reasoning strategies (Grossmann et al., 2012). Furthermore, burgeoning cases of “reverse mentoring” programs, in which younger employees advise older ones, question our reliance on traditional age- based advising structures (Murphy, 2012). Although there are growing opportunities for younger individuals to give advice based on their relative expertise and wisdom, we know little about the dynamics, and particu- larly the challenges, of these reverse-advising interactions, relative to more familiar forms of advice exchange from older experts to younger novices (Bonaccio & Dalal, 2006), or among peers (Eskreis-Winkler et al., 2018). Reverse advising is a context where being a younger adviser is coun- ter to what is expected. Because age drives expectations and prejudices for the self and others (Kang & Chasteen, 2009; North & Fiske, 2012), we posit that age plays a critical role in how individuals undervalue these dynamics. Prior research on interactions between younger and older individuals has documented younger individuals’ ageist atti- tudes and behaviors toward older others (Garstka et al., 2005; North & Fiske, 2013, 2015). These negative, age- based stereotypes have also yielded detrimental effects for the self—that is, internalizing feeling “too old” based on negative old-age stereotypes from the self or from others (Hess et al., 2003; Levy et al., 2002; von Hippel, 905221PSP XX X 10.1177/0146167220905221Personality and Social Psychology BulletinZhang and North research-article 2020 1 Harvard Business School, Boston, MA, USA 2 NYU Stern School of Business, New York City, NY, USA Corresponding Author: Ting Zhang, Harvard Business School, Morgan Hall 329, Boston, MA 02163, USA. Email: tzhang@hbs.edu What Goes Down When Advice Goes Up: Younger Advisers Underestimate Their Impact Ting Zhang 1 and Michael S. North 2 Abstract Common wisdom suggests that older is wiser. Consequently, people rarely give advice to older individuals—even when they are relatively more expert—leading to missed learning opportunities. Across six studies (N = 3,445), we explore the psychology of advisers when they are younger (reverse advising), the same age (peer advising), or older (traditional advising) than their advisees. Study 1 shows that advisers avoid reverse-advising interactions because they perceive that their relative youth makes them less effective. However, when compared to advisees’ actual perceptions, reverse advisers are misguided, as they underestimate their effectiveness when giving general life advice (Study 2a–2b) as well as tactical advice (Studies 3–4). This misperception is in part driven by advisers’ beliefs about their own competence and others’ receptivity. Finally, we demonstrate an intervention that mitigates advisers’ misguided beliefs (Study 5). Contrary to advisers’ own perceptions and popular belief, these findings illustrate that being relatively young can also mean being an impactful adviser. Keywords advice, reverse advising, age, expertise, intergenerational dynamics, preregistered, open data Received February 26, 2019; revision accepted January 10, 2020