An experiment examined the conditions under which an expert source induces less competent targets to adopt a point of view contradicting their own in a context of information transmission. In a 2x2 factorial design participants (N=86) were either 1st year or 4th year university students, and the style of the message delivered by the epistemic authority was either authoritarian or democratic. The main dependent variable was the degree to which participants went beyond mere approval and adopted the contradicting information. The principal finding was that the contradicting information was adopted more readily by the 1st year participants confronted with an authoritarian as compared to a democratic expert source. Students in their 4th year were more influenced by a democratic source than the 1st year students. These results partially confirm the correspondence hypothesis according to which appropriation of knowledge from an expert source is favoured when the characteristics of the influence relations match fundamental expectations that individuals have concerning this relationship, these expectations varying as a function of the stage they have reached in their university education. (Contains 4 tables and 9 notes.)