Heuristics in Health Decision Making: A Literature Review

Theoretical Background and research questions/hypothesis:  The study of decision behavior has a lot to offer to the medical and health fields. Patients have to judge their risk for specific diseases, decide which treatment to accept. Physicians also have to diagnose and recommend treatment plans for their patients. The literature on decision behavior suggests that human judgment is prone to biases in different domains. Given this, it is important to understand how heuristics are used in the health and medical decision making environments and their implications for the quality of decisions. 

Methods and Results (informing the conceptual analysis): This paper reviews the literature on heuristics in health decision making. Heuristics such as hindsight, confirmation bias, framing effects, availability, anchoring and adjustment, representativeness, and other heuristics are reviewed. The review concludes that it is evident that medical and health decisions are not immune to the biases characteristic of human decision making. The use of heuristics in the health decision environment is adaptive in instances but maladaptive in others. 

Conclusions: Heuristics will always be present thus making decisions vulnerable to the biases associated with them.

Implications for research and/or practice: Understanding how heuristics are applied and used in health is of great importance. This bottom-up approach takes into account people's information processing abilities (experts or novices). Understanding these processes help researchers and educators overcome their negative effects on health and medical decision making.