Role of specific similarity in a medical diagnostic task (original) (raw)

Specific Disease Knowledge as Predictor of Susceptibility to Availability Bias in Diagnostic Reasoning: a Randomized Controlled Experiment

Journal of General Internal Medicine, 2020

Background Bias in reasoning rather than knowledge gaps has been identified as the origin of most diagnostic errors. However, the role of knowledge in counteracting bias is unclear. Objective To examine whether knowledge of discriminating features (findings that discriminate between look-alike diseases) predicts susceptibility to bias. Design Three-phase randomized experiment. Phase 1 (bias-inducing): Participants were exposed to a set of clinical cases (either hepatitis-IBD or AMI-encephalopathy). Phase 2 (diagnosis): All participants diagnosed the same cases; 4 resembled hepatitis-IBD, 4 AMI-encephalopathy (but all with different diagnoses). Availability bias was expected in the 4 cases similar to those encountered in phase 1. Phase 3 (knowledge evaluation): For each disease, participants decided (max. 2 s) which of 24 findings was associated with the disease. Accuracy of decisions on discriminating features, taken as a measure of knowledge, was expected to predict susceptibility ...

Clinical similarities: an innovative approach for supporting medical decisions

Studies in health technology and informatics, 2013

Taking decisions in the medical domain is a very complex task. The context is strongly affected by uncertainty and the possible undesired side effects of the treatments have to be carefully considered. Currently, these decisions are based on the physician's own experience and the evidences of the published literature, according, when available, with the philosophy of Evidence Based Medicine. The main issues of this approach are that the own experience can be different, and the results in the literature are sometimes contrasting. For helping physicians while taking medical decisions, we are proposing an innovative approach based on the idea of the clinical similarity. Given a set of clinical variables, the proposed approach selects patients that are similar, presenting to the physician the respective decisions taken and the corresponding clinical effects.

Powerful Effects of Diagnostic Information on Automatic and Self-Reported Evaluation: The Moderating Role of Memory Recall

Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 2021

We sometimes learn about certain behaviors of others that we consider diagnostic of their character (e.g., that they did immoral things). Recent research has shown that such information trumps the impact of other (less diagnostic) information both on self-reported evaluations and on more automatic evaluations as probed with indirect measures such as the Affect Misattribution Procedure (AMP). We examined whether facilitating memory recall of alternative information moderates the impact of diagnostic information on evaluation. In Experiments 1 and 2, participants learned one diagnostic positive and one diagnostic negative behavior of two unfamiliar people. Presenting a cue semantically related to this information during evaluation influenced AMP scores but not self-reported liking scores. Experiments 3 and 4 showed that elaborative rehearsal of low diagnostic information eliminated diagnosticity effects on AMP scores and reduced them on self-reported liking scores. These findings help...