Clinical decision making Flashcards
What is confirmatory bias?
Tendency to search or interpret information in a way that confirms one’s preconceptions often leading to errors
What is the sunk cost fallacy?
Only factor affecting future actions should be future cost/benefits ratio but humans don’t always act rationally and often the more we’ve invested in the past, the more we are prepared to invest in a problem in the future
What is the gambler’s fallacy?
A logical fallacy involving mistaken belief that past effects will affect future events when dealing with independent events
What are availability heuristics?
Probabilities are overestimated on basis of how easily and or vividly they can be called to mind- individuals typically overestimate frequency of occurrence of catastrophic and dramatic events and people tend to heavily weight their judgements towards more recent information
What is representative heuristics?
Subjective probability that a stimulus belongs to a particular class based on how typical of that class it appears to be (regardless of base rate and probability) This is often very useful in daily life, it can also result in neglect of relevant base rates and other errors
How can we improve clinical decision making?
Recognise that heuristics and biases may be affecting our judgement even though we may not be aware of it
Counteract the effect of top-down information processing by generating alternative theories and looking for evidence to support them rather than looking for evidence that confirms our preferred theory
Understand and employ statistical principles
Use of algorithms and decision support systems
