A personality trait that may help us minimize diagnostic errors

I found this article fascinating – The Surprising Personality Trait That Massively Improves Decision-Making, According to Science The trait is called intellectual humility! In everyday language, it means the willingness to accept that you might be wrong and to not get defensive when arguments or information that’s unfavorable to your position comes to light. In medicine, we often have to assume a diagnosis when a patient enters the hospital.  We often assume a diagnosis in outpatient settings.  In both cases, we then should look for confirmatory evidence to either support our assumption or counter our assumption.  The supporting data help us solidify our diagnosis, but too often we minimize evidence against our initial assumption.  There are many heuristics possibility at work here – the mostly commonly cited are premature closure or the anchoring heuristic. Intellectual humility protects us against these heuristics. This is not to say that no one has trumpeted the importance of intellectual humility. On the HBR blogs, career coach Mark Bonche recently wrote about how fast learning requires a willingness to admit error, and various business gurus and VCs have long argued that the best kind of thinker is one with “strong opinions weakly held.” Final advice from the paper’s author: Some leaders have long understood the importance of “intellectual humility” then, but it’s clear from both the current political climate an...
Source: DB's Medical Rants - Category: Internal Medicine Authors: Tags: Medical Rants Source Type: blogs