Choosing a Physician on Social Media: Comments and Ratings of Users are More Important than the Qualification of a Physician

When people have access to information sources such as newspaper weather forecasts, drug-package inserts, and mutual-fund brochures, all of which provide convenient descriptions of risky prospects, they can make decisions from description. When people must decide whether to back up their computer's hard drive, cross a busy street, or go out on a date, however, they typically do not have any summary description of the possible outcomes or their likelihoods. For such decisions, people can call only on their own encounters with such prospects, making decisions from experience. Decisions from experience and decisions from description can lead to dramatically different choice behavior. In the case of decisions from description, people make choices as if they overweight the probability of rare events, as described by prospect theory. We found that in the case of decisions from experience, in contrast, people make choices as if they underweight the probability of rare events, and we explored the impact of two possible causes of this underweighting--reliance on relatively small samples of information and overweighting of recently sampled information. We conclude with a call for two different theories of risky choice.

Milner's (1963) report of impaired performance on the Wisconsin Card Sorting Test (WCST) in a group of patients with frontal lobe lesions suggested that this test might be a useful one in the investigation of individual patients with suspected brain lesions. However, for many of our older hospital population the WCST was found to be too difficult and distressing, and also the inherent ambiguities associated with certain responses limited the test's usefulness for research purposes. Therefore, a simpler and less ambiguous modification was devised (MCS) and a new method of measuring perseverative errors proposed. In a group of 53 patients with unilateral cerebral lesions, those with frontal lobe lesions performed less well with the MCST and made a higher proportion of perseverative errors than those with lesions elsewhere: there were no laterality effects in either frontal or non-frontal groups. The usefulness of the MCST for detecting frontal lobe lesions in individual patients was established, and the use of cut-off scores briefly discussed.

The authors investigated risk taking and underlying information use in 13- to 16- and 17- to 19-year-old adolescents and in adults in 4 experiments, using a novel dynamic risk-taking task, the Columbia Card Task (CCT). The authors investigated risk taking under differential involvement of affective versus deliberative processes with 2 versions of the CCT, constituting the most direct test of a dual-system explanation of adolescent risk taking in the literature so far. The "hot" CCT was designed to trigger more affective decision making, whereas the "cold" CCT was designed to trigger more deliberative decision making. Differential involvement of affective versus deliberative processes in the 2 CCT versions was established by self-reports and assessment of electrodermal activity. Increased adolescent risk taking, coupled with simplified information use, was found in the hot but not the cold condition. Need-for-arousal predicted risk taking only in the hot condition, whereas executive functions predicted information use in the cold condition. Results are consistent with recent dual-system explanations of risk taking as the result of competition between affective processes and deliberative cognitive-control processes, with adolescents' affective system tending to override the deliberative system in states of heightened emotional arousal. Copyright 2009 APA, all rights reserved.