Department of Experimental Psychology, University of Granada, Spain.
J Exp Psychol Appl. 2012 Mar;18(1):38-51. doi: 10.1037/a0026018. Epub 2011 Oct 31.
Doctors often make decisions for their patients and predict their patients' preferences and decisions to customize advice to their particular situation. We investigated how doctors make decisions about medical treatments for their patients and themselves and how they predict their patients' decisions. We also studied whether these decisions and predictions coincide with the decisions that the patients make for themselves. We document 3 important findings. First, doctors made more conservative decisions for their patients than for themselves (i.e., they more often selected a safer medical treatment). Second, doctors did so even if they accurately predicted that their patients would want a riskier treatment than the one they selected. Doctors, therefore, showed substantial self-other discrepancies in medical decision making and did not make decisions that accurately reflected their patients' preferences. Finally, patients were not aware of these discrepancies and thought that the decisions their doctors made for themselves would be similar to the decisions they made for their patients. We explain these results in light of 2 current theories of self-other discrepancies in judgment and decision making: the risk-as-feelings hypothesis and the cognitive hypothesis. Our results have important implications for research on expert decision making and for medical practice, and shed some light on the process underlying self-other discrepancies in decision making.
医生经常为患者做出决策，并预测患者的偏好和决策，以便根据其特定情况定制建议。我们研究了医生如何为患者和自己做出医疗治疗决策，以及如何预测患者的决策。我们还研究了这些决策和预测是否与患者为自己做出的决策相符。我们记录了 3 个重要发现。首先，医生为患者做出的决策比为自己做出的决策更为保守（即他们更常选择更安全的治疗方法）。其次，即使他们准确预测到患者希望接受比他们选择的治疗方法更具风险的治疗方法，医生仍然如此。因此，医生在医疗决策中表现出明显的自我与他人差异，并没有做出准确反映患者偏好的决策。最后，患者并没有意识到这些差异，并且认为医生为自己做出的决策与他们为患者做出的决策相似。我们根据判断和决策制定中自我与他人差异的两个当前理论——风险即感觉假说和认知假说——来解释这些结果。我们的研究结果对专家决策制定的研究和医学实践具有重要意义，并为决策制定中的自我与他人差异背后的过程提供了一些启示。
