Decision Making Flashcards
What is decision making?
The process by which we choose between multiple options.
What is traditional decision making and what are it’s limitations?
Two step process:
1. Gather all the information.
2. Use the information to carefully make a decision.
Step 1 is impossible:
Can never gather ALL the information.
Healthcare professionals would do many, many tests and never diagnose/treat.
What is satisficing?
Making a decision which will meet the minimum requirements for the task.
What are ‘fast’ and ‘slow’ processess?
Fast: sometimes automatic/unconsious decisions using only some of the available information.
Slow: conscious and deliberate decisions using more information and hypothesising.
What are heuristics?
Informal, intuitive mental shortcuts used to give an approximate answer to a problem quickly.
AKA gut feelings etc.
Fast thinking.
What are cognitive biases?
This is when the heuristics result in a flawed decision.
What is confirmation bias?
We selectively attend to, focus on and use information that fits with our existing ideas. We have groups of ideas or beliefs called ‘schemas’ which we use to make sense of all the information around us.
How could a patient holding the belief that all medicines are toxic influence their response to a new medication?
- Given a new asthma medication and feels very tired.
2. This tiredness must be due to my new asthma medication, I will stop taking it.
What is the risk of a patient holding the belief that all cancer is always fatal?
Ignore symptoms of cancer such as long term cancer, no point ging to the doctor as there is nothing they can do about it.
What is the representativeness heuristic?
When something resembles something else, it is judged to be highly likely that they are the same thing.
What is the framing bias?
The framing effect is an example of cognitive bias, in which people react to a particular choice in different ways depending on how it is presented; e.g. as a loss or as a gain. People tend to avoid risk when a positive frame is presented but seek risks when a negative frame is presented.
What is the primacy effect?
More focus on information presented first e.g. first symptom in a list. We are always told to put the most important information first.
What is the Recency effect?
More weight is given to more recent events e.g. that last symptom in a list.
What is the availability heuristic?
We are overly influenced by things we can easily recall e.g. How after your patient has an adverse drug reaction to a particular drug you might think this ADR is more common than those you havent seen.
What is the Ego bias?
We value things we produce/decisions we make more highly than those we don’t make.
