Gigerenzer,G.
Kurzenhäuser,S.

(from the chapter) There is growing empirical evidence that physicians rely on fast and frugal heuristics when they make treatment decisions. For instance, a recent study on decisions of British general practitioners to prescribe lipid-lowering drugs suggests that doctors do indeed use only very few cues for their decisions (Dhami & Harries, 2001). But in private conversations, physicians indicate that they often cannot risk admitting to using heuristics. At the same time, there is growing evidence that heuristics can be powerful tools for clinical judgments under uncertainty (Fischer et al., 2002; Forster et al., 2002). Medical researchers have begun discussing fast and frugal decision making as an alternative to classical decision making (Elwyn et al., 2001). The systematic study of fast and frugal decision making can help to bridge the worlds of intuitive heuristics and classical decision making. Furthermore, it can teach physicians what heuristics to use, as well as when and how to improve the decisions they make. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2006 APA, all rights reserved)

Gigerenzer, G., & Kurzenhäuser, S. (2005). Fast and frugal heuristics in medical decision making. In R. Bibace, J. D. Laird, K. L. Noller, & J. Valsiner (Eds.), Science and medicine in dialogue: Thinking through particulars and universals (pp. 3-15). Westport, CT: Praeger. (Full text)

Publication year	2005
Document type:	In book
Publication status:	Published
External URL:	http://library.mpib-berlin.mpg.de/ft/gg/GG_Fast_2005.pdf View
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