Clinical judgment, or the informal cognitive processes clinicians use to arrive at diagnoses, is subject to the same types of errors that people show in everyday intuition (Chapman & Chapman, 1967, 1969; Meehl, 1955). According to the medical diagnostic and social cognitive literature, diagnosticians will generate a limited number of hypotheses Dr. Schemas early in their diagnostic formulation and will attempt to fit subsequent information into these hypotheses (Elstein, Shulman & Sprafka, 1978; Taylor & Crocker, 1980). It was predicted in the present study that the schematic nature of clinical judgment would lead clinicians to show a primacy effect in their diagnostic preference. It was further predicted that this effect would be reduced if clinicians were encouraged to generate hypotheses continuously. / In order to test these predictions, 32 professional clinicians and 32 clinical psychology graduate students were administered two experimental diagnostic problems. The problems were designed to start out looking like one diagnosis and end up looking like another. To manipulate hypothesis generation, half of the subjects were randomly assigned to a condition in which they generated multiple hypotheses during pauses in symptom presentation. / The results indicated that on Problem 1, the professional clinicians showed a primacy effect in the non-hypothesis condition for diagnostic preference and schematically based recall. This effect disappeared in the hypothesis-generation condition, in which subjects seemed to pay more attention to symptoms occurring late in the problem. Students showed less of a tendency to be influenced by primacy effects and continuous hypothesis generation. Examination of the data in Problem 2 revealed that it was not designed sufficiently to induce the desired experimental manipulation. / Based on the subjects' responses in Problem 1, it appears that clinicians will weight more heavily information that appears early in a problem. This tendency may be reduced if clinicians generate hypotheses continuously. The use of the types of heuristics examined in this study seems to be more prevalent in more experienced diagnosticians. The findings suggest that it may be useful to train students to generate multiple hypotheses continuously, rather than only at the beginning of their problem formulation. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 43-07, Section: A, page: 2290. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1982.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:fsu.edu/oai:fsu.digital.flvc.org:fsu_74887 |
| Contributors | PATTERSON, DAVID ROY., Florida State University |
| Source Sets | Florida State University |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Text |
| Format | 104 p. |
| Rights | On campus use only. |
| Relation | Dissertation Abstracts International |
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