The framing heuristic influences judgements about younger and older adults' decision to refuse medical treatment
✍ Scribed by John M. Rybash; Paul A. Roodin
- Publisher
- John Wiley and Sons
- Year
- 1989
- Tongue
- English
- Weight
- 751 KB
- Volume
- 3
- Category
- Article
- ISSN
- 0888-4080
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
✦ Synopsis
Three-hundred and one young adults evaluated medical dilemmas in which a patient (1) was portrayed as either 40 or 70 years old, (2) decided to either refuse or consent to a risky treatment for a serious medical disorder, and (3) received either positively or negatively framed information about the potential effectiveness of a proposed medical treatment. Participants' evaluations of the patients' decisions reflected the implementation of a framing heuristic and an age heuristic. The framing heuristic influenced participants' judgements of patients who refused the proposed treatment. Specifically, information which was positively framed resulted in risk-avoiding judgements, while information which was negatively framed resulted in risk-taking judgements. The age heuristic predisposed participants to recommend that 40-year-old patients, more so than 70-year-old patients, opt for high-risk medical treatments that could potentially add a large number of years to their lives.
The purpose of the current investigation was to identify the psychological mechanisms which individuals use to determine if a patient has made a competent/ reasonable medical decision (cf.