A Study On The Impact Of Cognitive Closure On Patients' Decision - Making

At present, one reason for the increasing problems of doctors-patients’tension and medical disputes occurs in the medical field, which is the high exceptions of the result of the treatment. Patients’poor cognition of medical risk is contributed to the inequality of status between doctors and patients when they get medical information. A famous Ancient Greece physician Hippocrates once said, knowing the kinds of people who got sick is more important than knowing the sickness these person which have. So, it has important practical significance to study the cognitive for closure which is the cognitive variable of patients’medical decision-making. The need for cognitive closure is an important predicting variable that describes the characteristics of individual cognition. It is the individual motivation and desire of finding the clear answers when facing the ambiguous scenarios.This paper mainly consisted three sections of empirical studies which all designed by one-factor between-subjuect design.The first part of empirical research presented the procedures of treatment of coronary heart disease by information board technology which recorded the decision-making time and information-searching amount, depth and pattern of81patients in Jintan area, in order to explore the information processing mode of patients of different levels’ need for cognitive closure when they made medical decisions.The second part of empirical research concentrated on decision-making preference questionnaire in a sample of Jintan area’s238patients and their family members’, to explore the decision-making preference of patients of different levels’ need for cognitive closure.The third part of empirical research, compared Jintan area’s139high cognitive closure patients’frequency of treatment choice under the condition of the three results feedback, in order to explore the nature of ambiguity aversion. And the conclusions of this study were as follows:1. Need for cognitive closure impact on information processing mode of patients’ medical decision-making which contents four following aspects:First, on decision-making time, high cognitive closure patients’ decision-making time will be less than low cognitive closure patients’.Second, on amount of information gathering, high cognitive closure patients’ amount of information gathering will be lower than low cognitive closure patients’.Third, on depth of search, high cognitive closure patients’depth of search will be lower than low cognitive closure patients’.Fourth, on pattern of search, high cognitive closure patients tend to use heuristic information processing strategies, while low cognitive closure patients use rational analytic information processing strategies.2. Need for cognitive closure influences patients’decision-making preference on medical decisions. Compared to low cognitive closure patients, tend to opt for ambiguity aversion, which is to say, they are more reliable on doctors’consultations.3. High cognitive closure patients tend to opt for ambiguity aversion because of regret aversion, rather than risk aversion...