Investigation momentum: The relentless pursuit to resolve uncertainty.
Debate regarding the prostate-specific antigen (PSA) screening test centers around test reliability and whether screening reduces mortality.1-3 We consider yet another potential downside to the widespread use of unreliable screening tests: the downstream effect of receiving inconclusive or ambiguous results. When receiving information from screening tests, we usually want to know whether the result is …
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Confessing One’s Sins but Still Committing Them: Transparency and the Failure of Disclosure.
Authored Chapter 6 for Behavioural Public Policy with Cain, D., & Loewenstein, G. How can individuals best be encouraged to take more responsibility for their well-being and their environment or to behave more ethically in their business transactions? Across the world, governments are showing a growing interest in using behavioural economic research to inform the …
Physicians under the influence: Social psychology and industry marketing strategies.
Abstract Pharmaceutical and medical device companies apply social psychology to influence physicians’ prescribing behavior and decision making. Physicians fail to recognize their vulnerability to commercial influences due to self-serving bias, rationalization, and cognitive dissonance. Professionalism offers little protection; even the most conscious and genuine commitment to ethical behavior cannot eliminate unintentional, subconscious bias. Six principles …
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Disclosing conflicts of interest in patient decision aids.
ABSTRACT Background In 2005, the International Patient Decisions Aid Standards (IPDAS) Collaboration developed quality criteria for patient decisions aids; one of the quality dimensions dealt with disclosure of conflicts of interest (COIs). The purposes of this paper are to review newer evidence on dealing with COI in the development of patient decision aids and to …
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The burden of disclosure: Increased compliance with distrusted advice.
Abstract Professionals often face conflicts of interest that give them an incentive to provide biased advice, and disclosure (informing advisees about the conflict) is frequently proposed as a solution to the problem. We present 6 experiments that reveal a previously unrecognized perverse effect of disclosure: Although disclosure can decrease advisees’ trust in the advice, it …
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Cheap talk and credibility: The consequences of confidence and accuracy on advisor credibility and persuasiveness.
Abstract Is it possible to increase one’s influence simply by behaving more confidently? Prior research presents two competing hypotheses: (1) the confidence heuristic holds that more confidence increases credibility, and (2) the calibration hypothesis asserts that overconfidence will backfire when others find out. Study 1 reveals that, consistent with the calibration hypothesis, while accurate advisors …
