I’ve written before about the idea of visceral bias – the emotional influence on our behavior when we perceive a patient is difficult, delicate, or special somehow – and its impact on medical decision making.

May 30, 2021 · Visceral bias is a type of affective error where a clinician’s thoughts and decisions are impacted by emotions towards the patient, which may be positive or negative [1]. This may be influenced by a clinician’s own personal background, experiences, relationships and values.

Mar 10, 2020 · Visceral arousal may put us at risk for making poor decisions. Countertransference, involving both negative and positive feelings towards patients, may result in diagnoses being missed. Additionally, patient behavior can …

Affective or visceral bias: Countertransference or a professional's feeling towards the patient results in misdiagnosis. The patient presenting with chest pain reminds you of a relative that you know well, so you do not perform a full history or examination: Anchoring bias

Jan 15, 2021 · Clinicians may reduce the potentially deleterious effects of biases by using a variety of mitigating strategies, including education about biases, reflective review, supervision, and feedback.

Biases have a variety of forms and appear as cognitive ("cold") bias, such as mental noise, [5] or motivational ("hot") bias, such as when beliefs are distorted by wishful thinking. Both effects can be present at the same time.

Apr 29, 2020 · Visceral bias: This is a particularly strong bias where our feelings towards the patients, negatively or positively, affects our overall care. It affects the time we spend at the bedside, the story we unpack, and then the diagnoses we make.

Search satisfying bias: In presence of a main diagnosis, to stop to look for secondary ones. In this way, the physician will miss comorbidities, complications, and additional diagnoses: To attribute to hypertensive heart disease the atrial fibrillation occurred in a patient with essential hypertension, missing hyperthyroidism: Sunk cost bias a

The cognitive biases that were the least likely in the analysed cases were visceral bias, choice overload bias and decision fatigue (evaluated as “not likely” in 6/7, 6/7 and 4/7 cases, respectively). Cognitive dissonance and premature closure were associated with default bias and in-group bias in 3/7 clinical cases.

The most common cognitive biases in the day (92 cases) and night shifts (294 cases) showed no significant difference (29.3 and 31.3%, respectively). Confirmation bias, premature closure, base-rate neglect, visceral bias, and Maslow’s hammer were more common at …