Is diagnostic judgment influenced by a bias to see pathology?

The clinical judgment literature suggests that clinicians are biased to see psychopathology. The social cognition literature shows that people can be biased to search for information relevant only to the hypothesis under test and to ignore information relevant to the alternative. In light of these b...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Journal of clinical psychology 1999-04, Vol.55 (4), p.513-518
Main Authors: Shemberg, Kenneth M., Doherty, Michael E.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Bias
Biological and medical sciences
Cognition & reasoning
Health staff related problems. Vocational training
Humans
Judgment
Medical sciences
Mental Disorders - diagnosis
Mental Disorders - psychology
Prejudice
Psycholinguistics
Psychologists
Psychology
Psychology, Clinical - standards
Psychology. Psychoanalysis. Psychiatry
Psychopathology. Psychiatry
Random Allocation
Reading
Social psychiatry. Ethnopsychiatry
Surveys and Questionnaires
Terminology as Topic
Citations: Items that this one cites
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Summary:The clinical judgment literature suggests that clinicians are biased to see psychopathology. The social cognition literature shows that people can be biased to search for information relevant only to the hypothesis under test and to ignore information relevant to the alternative. In light of these biases, we asked practicing clinicians (N = 106 respondents) in three conditions to read 1 of 9 biographical essays. The conditions called for the clinicians to judge the writer of the essay as (a) psychologically healthy or not, (b) psychologically healthy or unhealthy, or (c) experiencing psychopathology or not. The latter condition was expected to produce the highest frequency of negative judgments. The opposite result was obtained. To determine if this was due to the extreme wording in the “psychopathology” condition, 30 additional practicing clinicians assessed whether the writer of the essay was psychologically unhealthy or not. A comparison of these data with those from the two less extreme conditions showed no bias. The results were interpreted as an appropriate level of conservativism in clinical judgment with respect to the extreme diagnosis implied by the term psychopathology. © 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. J Clin Psychol 55: 513–518, 1999.
ISSN:0021-9762
1097-4679
DOI:10.1002/(SICI)1097-4679(199904)55:4<513::AID-JCLP13>3.0.CO;2-W