Recent quotes:

Availability heuristic

Emergency department physicians who saw patients with a pulmonary embolism -- a blood clot in the lung -- were about 15% likelier over the next 10 days to test subsequent patients for the same thing. Rules of thumb, also known as heuristics, could influence how physicians deliver care. One such rule of thumb is the "availability heuristic," under which a person assesses an event's likelihood by how easily the event comes to mind. For physicians, recent conditions seen may be particularly notable. Under this heuristic, if a physician sees a condition in a recent patient, they may be more likely to test for the condition in the next patient they see.

Cognitive errors in medicine: The common errors - First10EM

Feedback sanction A factor that can reinforce other diagnostic errors that is particularly common in emergency medicine. The idea is that there may be a significant time delay until one sees the consequences of a cognitive error, or they may never see that consequence at all, and therefore behavior is reinforced. For example, we are criticized heavily if we miss a diagnosis, but we never see the results of increased CT usage (there is feedback sanction in that any cancers caused will not be identified for decades), therefore we are biased towards more CT usage.

Cognitive errors in medicine: The common errors - First10EM

This list represents the cognitive biases that are most often described in the context of medical errors, but there are many other cognitive biases that affect our daily lives. For example, I particularly like the IKEA effect: our tendency to disproportionately value objects we had a hand in putting together, regardless of end result.

Under time pressure, people tell us what we want to hear -- ScienceDaily

To test this assumption, Protzko, Zedelius and their UCSB colleague Jonathan Schooler devised a test of 10 simple yes-or-no questions, such as "I sometimes feel resentful when I don't get my way," and "No matter who I'm talking to, I'm always a good listener." Through a survey, respondents were asked to take fewer than 11 seconds, or alternatively, more than 11 seconds to answer each question.They found that the fast-answering group was more likely to give socially-desireable answers, while the slow answerers and the ones who were not given any time constraints (fast or slow) were less likely to do so, Protzko said.