Measuring Doctors' Self-insight into their Treatment Decisions

We report two studies here. Both focus on the nature and measurement of self-knowledge in judgement making. In the first study we asked 32 British family physicians (GPs) to identify their own policy from sets of policies describing their own and their contemporaries' prescription behaviour. They were no better at identifying their own stated policies than the policies we had statistically generated to describe their behaviour. In the second study we measured the information 30 GPs selected while making judgements about prescription. Patterns of information selection were similar to the way the GPs rated the influence of the information but dissimilar to the pattern of information use as measured in a judgement analysis. The pattern of results in both studies is consistent with the possibility that the knowledge GPs have is of the extent to which they attend to information. Copyright © 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

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