This study examines the hypothesis that patients perceive physicians who recommend more active and major treatment as having greater epistemic authority. The hypothesis is based on the assumption that patients expect that their physicians should advocate for an active treatment rather than abstention from treatment. The sample included 631 participants. Data were collected using a between-subjects design and scenarios that described a person who suffers from a medical problem and visits a physician (surgeon, orthopedist, or dentist). The physician gives a passive or active recommendation regarding treatment. Different levels of passive recommendation (against or wait on treatment) and active recommendation (minor, moderate, or major procedures) were used. The experience of the physician was also manipulated. The dependent measure was the patient's rating of the physician's epistemic authority. Physicians who prescribed an active mode of treatment were perceived as having a higher epistemic authority than physicians who gave a passive recommendation. We named this phenomenon the medical expertise bias, as people might be biased when judging the level of expertise of their physicians such that those physicians who recommend an active treatment are considered to have greater medical epistemic authority in general.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, most countries introduced restrictions on the functioning of schools and moved the educational process to virtual networks and family homes (Song et al., 2020). In Poland, after two weeks of suspended classes, remote teaching was launched. Each institution had to rapidly develop its own implementation strategy. The methodology of conducting classes before lockdown did not take into account blended learning, and
The goal of this experimental project was to investigate lay peoples’ perceptions of epistemic authority (EA) in the field of finance. EA is defined as the extent to which a source of information is treated as evidence for judgments independently of its objective expertise and based on subjective beliefs. Previous research suggested that EA evaluations are biased and that lay people tend to ascribe higher EA to experts who advise action (in the case of medical experts) or confirm clients’ expectations (in the case of politicians). However, there has been no research into biases in lay evaluations of financial experts and this project is aimed to fill this gap. Experiment 1 showed that lay people tended to ascribe greater authority to financial consultants who gave more active advice to clients considering taking out a mortgage. Experiment 2 confirmed the action advice effect found in Experiment 1. However, the outcomes of Experiments 2 and – particularly – 3 suggested that this bias might also be due to clients’ desire to confirm their own opinions. Experiment 2 showed that the action advice effect was moderated by clients’ own opinions on taking loans. Lay people ascribed the greatest EA to the advisor in the scenario in which he advised taking action and where this coincided with the client’s positive opinion on the advisability of taking out a loan. In Experiment 3 only participants with a positive opinion on the financial product ascribed greater authority to experts who recommended it; participants whose opinion was negative tended to rate consultants who advised rejecting the product more highly. To conclude, these three experiments revealed that lay people ascribe higher EA to financial consultants who advise action rather than maintenance of the status quo, but this effect is limited by confirmation bias: when the client’s a priori opinion is salient, greater authority is ascribed to experts whose advice confirms it. In this sense, results presented in the present paper suggest that the action advice effect might be also interpreted as a specific manifestation of confirmation bias.
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