This week's
AMNews, the newsletter of the American Medical Association, includes
an excerpt from Dr. Jerome Groopman's book
How Doctors Think (
amazon.com book info). The excerpt discusses a case of missed diagnosis of cardiac disease in a healthy man and gives a great example of the representativeness heuristic in clinical decision-making.
Groopman notes of the case and how it illustrates this kind of bias:
The mistake Croskerry made is called a representativeness error: your
thinking is guided by a prototype, so you fail to consider possibilities that
contradict the prototype and thus attribute the symptoms to the wrong
cause.
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