Clinicians look for evidence to confirm a diagnosis they think you might have

What is it about?

The two studies in this paper revealed strong evidence that when psychologists form an initial diagnosis, they seek confirming information in an effort to determine whether their diagnosis is CORRECT (rather than seeking information to determine whether their diagnosis is INCORRECT). This behavior - selectively seeking confirming information and overlooking or ignoring disconfirming information, is called "confirmation bias." Confirmation bias is a problem because overlooking disconfirming information can lead to misdiagnosis, failure to receive proper treatment, unjust sanctions, and more. Psychologists should take steps to reduce confirmatory bias in their diagnostic reasoning, such as carefully considering and documenting evidence both for and against each element of their decision process.

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Photo by 愚木混株 cdd20 on Unsplash

Photo by 愚木混株 cdd20 on Unsplash

Why is it important?

Bias is a concern in psychological practice as well as in expert judgments more generally. Results of these studies show small biasing effects from the order of symptom presentation as well as robust evidence of confirmatory information seeking after forming an initial diagnosis. In other words, after psychologists formed a diagnostic hypothesis, they were prone to seek information that supported that hypothesis. Although further research is needed to better understand bias, these findings validate previous works (see Arkes et al., 1988; Lerner & Tetlock, 1999; Mussweiler et al., 2000) that suggest psychologists need to take specific steps to reduce bias in their work and that the field needs to develop standardized, evidence-based processes to mitigate these effects.

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