Decision-making: Risk school

Environmental Behavior and Fast and Frugal Heuristics

“…We applaud this approach of structuring the environment in such a fashion so that certain options become much more salient. At the same time, Thaler argues that "our ability to de-bias people is quite limited" (Bond 2009(Bond , p. 1190, suggesting that people's ability to learn and reason is sub-optimal and frequently leads to the choice of the second best option. The fast and frugal research program has shown that this is not necessary.…”

Uncertainty, Decision Science, and Policy Making: A Manifesto for a Research Agenda

“…The story goes as follows (Katsikopoulos 2014): People are systematically behaving irrationally, but because they are in principle able to figure out how to behave rationally, they should keep trying to do so. Interestingly, however, the proponents of the idealistic approach do not believe that people can actually learn to behave "rationally" (Bond 2009).…”

Improving Evidence-Based Practices Through Health Literacy—Reply

“…3 The dismissive tone of the article by Woloshin and Schwartz 1 is in contrast to another recent article on drug treatment of obesity, which noted that the new drugs may be useful adjuncts to lifestyle treatment for carefully selected patients. 4 Bias against people with obesity, even from physicians, is well documented. 5 Patients with obesity have difficulty finding clinicians who take their condition seriously enough to offer compassionate, evidence-based treatment.…”

“…Previous studies have shown that physicians have poor comprehension of the concepts used in the medical literature and have difficulty understanding the reported numbers (eg, results) and how to apply them to practice. 4 In one study, physicians were asked to determine the probability that someone who tests positive for the fecal occult blood test has colon cancer if they were given the values of the prevalence of the disease and the sensitivity and specificity of the test. 5 The answers ranged from 1% to 99%.…”

“…One frequently discussed answer assumes that people are troubled with cognitive deficits that make them predictably irrational and basically hopeless at dealing with risks so that they need to be "nudged" into healthy behavior. 4 Yet the fact that even fourth graders can understand the positive predictive value if information is presented in "natural frequencies" shows that the problem does not lie in stable cognitive deficits but in how information is presented to physicians and patients. This includes biased reporting in medical journals, brochures, and the media, using relative risks and other misleading statistics owing to conflicts of interest and defensive medicine that do not promote informed physicians and patients.…”