There's a book called "Thinking Fast and Slow" by Daniel Kahneman that talks about systematic bias in human heuristic thinking.
> The more easily people can call a scenario to mind, the more probable they find it.
This is practically a restatement of the "availability bias" from that book. It came to mind immediately when I saw the article's title "How can Medical Professionals Avoid Making Assumptions That Lead to Mistakes?"
The answer is probably that they can't, because they're human. One can put good processes in place, and do things like checklisting that dissuade people from making fast heuristic decisions (which we know are systematically, and predictably wrong). But people really hate stuff like that, doctors especially, and so it's an ongoing cultural battle.
Doctors in this regard are no different than software engineers, or plumbers, or any other human at work, they just get more attention when they screw up because people die.
Well of course it brings Kahneman to mind. A good quarter of the article is a digression into Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman's research, including a mention of availability bias by name ("“Consequently,” Amos and Danny wrote, “the use of the availability heuristic leads to systematic biases.”")
There's both more risks but also there's a substantial time pressure on doctors which engineers generally do not face when designing something (ask an engineer to design a critical part of a bridge in an hour and they'll rightly tell you to fuck off, but a doctor often has less time to make critical decisions). The other problem, which is fixable, is the general overworking of medical professionals. The hours they work are often ridiculous, and this also worsens the time pressure and means there's less scope for serious review.
Are only 'priming studies' in doubt? Or are most of the studies in social psychology in doubt today? The experiments and conclusions used to fascinate me, but once you lose trust it becomes hard to believe again.
I used to think all these experiments are conducted on people vastly different from me or the people I interact with, so those findings are not applicable to me. But now it seems that those are not applicable even to people who are a lot like the subjects of the experiments.
I'm probably having the bias where one under the influence of a single significant factor ignores all the rest :).
Another thing to note is that some of the attempts to show cognitive bias at work are more easily explained by deliberately misleading or confusing wording of questions (i.e., framing a question in such a way that the person being asked thinks the question is "what is the conditional probability of Y given X" when the questioners then turn around and say "gotcha! We were really asking for the base rate of Y in the general population!").
It's a bit different because a doctor's mistake can lead to an irreversible outcome.
That's true of some engineers (those who design bridges or the software that goes in a pacemaker or car ECU), but not others (the engineer that designs alarm clocks .. or the ones that design half the shit Big Clive buys from China).
Sure mistakes in other fields can lead to loss of work or infrastructure changes/mistakes that lead to millions being lost in revenue, but rarely something as irreversible as death.
You're thinking small. Imagine the impact a bug in a FEM software package could cause if everything was then designed to be half the strength it should. Or a low quality chainsaw chain pin that would randomly break and release a sharpened chain at high speed. A propane water heater that isn't vented correctly, suffocating everyone in the house when the wind changes direction. Or even furniture that has screws that are too long, so the kid who jumps on the couch gets stabbed.
These kinds of examples are everywhere. Doctors aren't special snowflakes who hold human life in the palm of their hand, everyone from bus drivers to lawyers to electricians can kill people if they screw up.
> The more easily people can call a scenario to mind, the more probable they find it.
This is practically a restatement of the "availability bias" from that book. It came to mind immediately when I saw the article's title "How can Medical Professionals Avoid Making Assumptions That Lead to Mistakes?"
The answer is probably that they can't, because they're human. One can put good processes in place, and do things like checklisting that dissuade people from making fast heuristic decisions (which we know are systematically, and predictably wrong). But people really hate stuff like that, doctors especially, and so it's an ongoing cultural battle.
Doctors in this regard are no different than software engineers, or plumbers, or any other human at work, they just get more attention when they screw up because people die.