Impact Of Evidence Information And Self-reference On Medical Decision-making

Previous laboratory research showed that decision-making,especially medical decision-making,deviated from the correct answer(Brase & Hill,2017).when integrating information,we tended to pay attention to evidence information — intuitively perceived phenomena,while ignoring prior probability.This phenomenon showed cognitive biases such as partiality,smallness,and what you see is what you get,and this might lead to serious consequences and even endanger life.Therefore,it is important to avoid the cognitive bias in medical decision-making,correctly understand and quantify the uncertain information,and make a reasonable decision accordingly.To this end,many scholars have conducted research on how to reduce cognitive bias in decision-making,and tried to improve the people’ performance by providing visual information(Reani,Peek,& Jay,2019)and causal information of false alert rate(Turpin et al.,2020),etc.,but still failed to discover the reasons behind this phenomenon.Hattori and Nishida(2009)proposed the Equiprobability Hypothesis,and found provide evidence information that could be easily identified as imbalanced probability structure(IPS),which could effectively reduce the "transpositional representation" bias and "base rate neglect(BRN)" and improve decision performance.In the past,most of the researches were about decision-making tasks on Equiprobability Hypothesis,which lack the research combined with the factors of decision-makers.For this reason,based on the Equiprobability Hypothesis,this study adopted the X syndrome task(negative context)and rehabilitation task(positive context).Through two experiments,explore how information evidence affects people’s cognitive mechanisms for solving medical decision-making tasks.In experiment 1,we employed a 2(evidence information: positive test or cough)×2(self-reference: related to oneself/not)between-subjects design to investigate the influence of evidence information and self-reference on medical decision-making withnegative context.This result discovered that(1)The decision-making correct rate and accuracy of the subjects under “cough” condition was significantly higher than the “positive test” condition;(2)The decision-making performance in the problem “related to oneself” was better than that in problems “not related to oneself”.(3)Under the evidence information of “positive test”,the correct rate and accuracy in the “related to oneself” condition was significantly higher than “not related to oneself” condition;and under the evidence information of“cough”,individual’s medical decision-making performance was not affected by self-reference;(4)The typical error rate of the “positive test”of “not related to oneself” group was significantly difference that of the other three groups.In Experiment 2,we also employed a 2(evidence information:specific drug or folk prescription)×2(self-reference: related to oneself/not)between-subjects design.While the results of Experiment 1were tested repeatedly,the differences of medical decision-making with positive context between related to oneself and not were further explored.This result discovered that(1)The decision-making correct rate and accuracy of the subjects under “folk prescription” condition was significantly higher than the “specific drug” condition;(2)In the positive medical task,the difference between the the “related to oneself” condition and “not related to oneself” condition was not significant;(3)The typical error rate of the “specific drug” of “not related to oneself” group was significantly difference that of the other three groups.This study draws the following conclusions:1.Presenting appropriate evidence information can improve the performance of medical decision-making by helping identify the IPS.2.When the collected evidence information prompted people to recognize the IPS,the role of self-reference is related to event value,which may affect medical decision-making performance through two factors--processing depth and subjective desire.3.Medical decision-making shows the tendency of BRN,but this kind of cognitive bias will change with different evidence information and different self-reference.In short,the results of this study support the hypothesis of Equiprobability Hypothesis,which reminds people to pay attention to the identification of IPS in medical decision-making.