Abstract: The source of advice in our daily life always could be both the real individual and circumstance. We receive advice not only from verbal cues, but also from non-verbal cues which are reflected by the way the individual express, such as the expression, the posture and the gesture. Both of them influence advice-taking process. There are two kinds of regulatory focuses, namely promotion focus and prohibition focus. When they are matched with equivalent advising strategy, for example, eager strategy and vigilant strategy respectively, the regulatory fit will be come into being. Regulatory fit could boost people’s feeling of right, which will heighten one’s value from fit. One of the possible results of regulatory fit is people’s willingness of acceptance for other’s advice. Thus, this study aims to explore the impact of regulatory fit on advice taking under verbal cues and non-verbal cues condition. We discussed the advice-taking circumstances under two kinds of circumstances: Verbal cues (study 1) and non-verbal cues (study 2). Our hypotheses are that, in verbal-cues and non-verbal-cues conditions, the main effect of regulatory orientation has no influence on advice making, but regulatory fit has. And it is more possible for a promotive judge to take the eager/desirable advice; whilst it is more possible for a preventive judge to take the vigilance advice. Both of the studies used a mixed-design, specifically, 2 regulatory orientations (promotion/ prevention) × 2 advising strategies (desirable/vigilance). The sample are 81 (experiment 1) and 79 (experiment 2) undergraduates respectively. Our study results proved that people had higher level in advice-taking with regulatory fit under verbal-cues condition (study 1). It also showed little differences in advice-taking with promotion fit, and a higher level advice-taking with prevention – vigilance fit under non-verbal-cue condition (study 2). The results with non-verbal-cue condition are not completely the same as verbal-cue condition, this outcome awaits further exploration. Implications, limitations and further research were discussed as well.

Key words: advice-taking, regulatory fit, verbal cues, non-verbal cues, norm theory