What the public wants from their professional: attitudes toward decision making strategies

Eastwood, Joseph (2007) What the public wants from their professional: attitudes toward decision making strategies. Masters thesis, Memorial University of Newfoundland.

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Abstract

Attitudes toward four types of decision making strategies (clinical/fully-rational, clinical/heuristic, actuarial/fully-rational, and actuarial/heuristic) were examined. Participants (N = 80) were randomly split between a legal or medical decision making scenario and asked to judge, on a 7-point rating scale, each strategy in terms of (a) preference, (b) accuracy, (c) fairness, (d) ethicalness, and (e) similarity to how legal and medical professionals actually render decisions. Results showed that the clinical/fully-rational strategy was rated the highest across all attitudinal judgments, whereas the actuarial/heuristic strategy received the lowest ratings across all judgments. Considering the two strategy-differentiating factors separately, clinically-based strategies were always rated higher than actuarially-based strategies and fully-rational strategies were always rated higher than heuristic-based strategies. The potential implications of the results for professional decision makers and those affected by their decisions are discussed.

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