Medical decision making

This chapter presents an overview of the field of medical decision making. It distinguishes the levels of decision making seen in health-care practice and shows how research in judgment and decision making support or improve decision making. Most of the research has been done at the micro level, particularly the research on biases and heuristics. One way to improve medical decisions is to incorporate effective debiasing strategies or manipulations into them. The chapter discusses the framing of risks and the role of affect that has gained more attention in medical decision making in recent years. Next it highlights that eliciting judgments from the general public may entail problems related to affective forecasting. The chapter discusses the finding that judgments one makes for oneself seem to be different from those one makes for others. Finally, it talks about the implementation of prevention programs and topics of health literacy and numeracy