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Sunday, April 29, 2007

I always have a keen interest in psychology. During my school days, whenever the class is boring, i would thought about many behaviour in humans. I am curious about why humans behave differently, react in different ways. All these psychological effects have a great impact on our human body.

Biological and environmental influences play a very important role in determining human behaviour. Example, men are usually more aggressive as aggressiveness correlates with testosterone (the male sex hormone).

In the medical field important decisions are made daily by physicians, nurses, and even patients. Perhaps a doctor has to decide whether or not to continue resuscitation, or a patient decides whether to have angioplasty or open-heart bypass surgery. Unfortunately most decisions made in the medical field, like these, are made under uncertainty, and with uncertainty comes risk. Most of us consider risk the chance that something will go wrong, the chance of something bad happening. Thus, in the medical field risk is something along the lines of the chance that the surgery will go wrong, or the chance of death. Often these chances are portrayed to medical staff or patients through probabilities or proportions. For example, a doctor may tell his female patient that she has a 12.5% chance of developing breast cancer in her lifetime. However, what does this statistic really mean? This is why risk communication is very important for an individual who wants to make the best possible decision under the circumstances. However, many studies have demonstrated how it is very poor. Particularly, the studies have shown low comprehension and satisfaction among patients in the setting of physician risk communication.

One of the reasons why risk communication may suffer is because of framing effects. Framing effects occur when information is presented in a format that is likely to influence an individual's decision. For example, a doctor may tell a patient that he has a 10% chance of dying if he undergoes a surgery. However, he could also frame it to be a 90% chance of surviving and the patient's decision to undergo the surgery may be dependent on which way the doctor decides to inform his patient. In most cases the patients are more apt to undergo the surgery if they are presented with statistics in terms of survival. Thus, you can see the power that framing effects have. It is because of this power that many experts believe that information should be presented in both formats in an attempt to "unbias" the presentation.
In addition, risk communication is jeopardized as a result of patients using heuristics, specifically representative heuristics. With a representative heuristic, individuals make judgments influenced on past experience or knowledge that resembles the circumstance at hand. So in relevance to risk communication, patients may hear and understand the statistic that a certain procedure has an 80% success rate but at the same time they may be persuaded by the fact that they have a friend whose experience with the procedure did not go well. Thus, the 20% who did not have success with the procedure may be more salient in the patients consideration. Perhaps it is because it is sometimes easier for people to identify with a specific individual rather than a "statistically average person." Furthermore, statistical information is abstract in nature; it provides a risk estimate, whereas anecdotal information, your knowledge about your friend's experience, is more concrete. The procedure either worked for her or didn't.
Both framing effects and heuristics may bias an individual's decision about what the best option is in their given situation, thus making it hard for risk communication to be most opportunistic.

Just to share and recap something about what i have studied in psychology during my polytechnic days. Well, i think it may be inaccurate to judge or conclude something based on heuristics, be it representative or availability. Afterall, uncertainty comes with a risk.

{ 12:51 PM }