Are medical treatments for individuals and groups like single-play and multiple-play gambles?

Journal Title: Judgment and Decision Making - Year 2006, Vol 1, Issue 2

Abstract

People are often more likely to accept risky monetary gambles with positive expected values when the gambles will be played more than once. We investigated whether this distinction between single-play and multiple-play gambles extends to medical treatments for individual patients and groups of patients. Resident physicians and medical students (n = 69) and undergraduates (n = 99) ranked 9 different flu shots and a no-flu-shot option in 1 of 4 combinations of perspective (individual patient vs. group of 1000 patients) and uncertainty frame (probability vs. frequency). The rank of the no-flu-shot option (a measure of preference for treatment vs. no treatment) was not significantly related to perspective or participant population. The main effect of uncertainty frame and the interaction between perspective and uncertainty frame approached significance (0.1 > p > 0.05), with the no-flu-shot option faring particularly poorly (treatment faring particularly well) when decisions about many patients were based on frequency information. Undergraduate participants believed that the no-flu-shot option would be less attractive (treatment would be more attractive) in decisions about many patients, but these intuitions were inconsistent with the actual ranks. These results and those of other studies suggest that medical treatments for individuals and groups are not analogous to single-play and multiple-play monetary gambles, perhaps because many people are unwilling to aggregate treatment outcomes over patients in the same way that they would compute net gains or losses over monetary gambles.

Authors and Affiliations

Michael L. DeKay, John C. Hershey, Mark D. Spranca, Peter A. Ubel, and David A. Asch

Keywords

Related Articles

In the winning mood: Affect in the Iowa gambling task

The present research aimed to test the role of mood in the Iowa Gambling Task (IGT; Bechara et al., 1994). In the IGT, participants can win or lose money by picking cards from four different decks. They have to learn by...

The skill element in decision making under uncertainty: Control or competence?

Many natural decisions contain an element of skill. Modern conceptions of the skill component include control (Goodie, 2003) and competence (Heath & Tversky, 1991). The control hypothesis states that a task's skill compo...

Bullshit for you; transcendence for me. A commentary on “On the reception and detection of pseudo-profound bullshit”

I raise a methodological concern regarding the study performed by Pennycook, Cheyne, Barr, Koehler & Fugelsang (2015), in which they used randomly generated, but syntactically correct, statements that were rated for prof...

The unconscious thought advantage: Further replication failures from a search for confirmatory evidence

According to the deliberation without attention (DWA) hypothesis, people facing a difficult choice will make a better decision after a period of distraction than after an equally long period of conscious deliberation, an...

Making good cider out of bad apples — Signaling expectations boosts cooperation among would-be free riders

The present study investigates how group-cooperation heuristics boost voluntary contributions in a repeated public goods game. We manipulate two separate factors in a two-person public goods game: i) group composition (S...

Download PDF file
  • EP ID EP677556
  • DOI -
  • Views 296
  • Downloads 0

How To Cite

Michael L. DeKay, John C. Hershey, Mark D. Spranca, Peter A. Ubel, and David A. Asch (2006). Are medical treatments for individuals and groups like single-play and multiple-play gambles?. Judgment and Decision Making, 1(2), -. https://europub.co.uk/articles/-A-677556