Impact of Availability Heuristic in Healthcare
Investigate how the availability heuristic influences healthcare decisions, leading to unnecessary testing and treatments.
Page Summary
An examination of how the availability heuristic, judging likelihood by how easily examples come to mind, distorts healthcare decisions for both patients and clinicians. It covers the news-story effect, cyberchondria and symptom-search loops, clinicians anchoring to recent cases, diagnostic errors and over-testing, base-rate neglect, and media-driven epidemic psychology with a COVID-19 case study, then gives practical debiasing strategies for patients, clinicians, and health systems, closing on the lesson that frequency is not familiarity.
Contributions
Every accepted correction to this page is recorded with the exact change, so readers can see how the page improved over time.
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Correct journal: the 1978 Lichtenstein et al. study appeared in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Learning and Memory, not Health Psychology (which began in 1982).
BeforeA study published in Health Psychology by Lichtenstein, Slovic, Fischhoff, Layman, and Combs (1978)
AfterA study published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Learning and Memory by Lichtenstein, Slovic, Fischhoff, Layman, and Combs (1978)
Why: Health Psychology did not begin publication until 1982, so the 1978 Lichtenstein et al. study could not have appeared there; it was published in Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Learning and Memory.
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