Cognitive Errors and Diagnostic Mistakes

Jonathan Howard MDAssistant Professor, Neurology and PsychiatryNYU Langone Medical CenterNew York, NY

• An introduction to cognitive biases and how they led to errors and impact medical diagnoses.- Aggregate bias.- Anchoring.- Availability.- Base-rate neglect.- Commission bias.- Diagnosis momentum.- Feedback sanction.- Framing effect.- Fundamental attribution error.- Gambler’s fallacy.- Gender bias.- Hindsight bias.- Multiple alternatives bias.- Omission bias.- Order effects.- Outcome bias.- Overconfidence bias.- Playing the odds.- Posterior probability error.- Premature closure.- Psych-out error.- Representativeness restraint.- Search satisfying.- Sutton’s slip.- Triage cueing.- Unpacking principle.- Vertical line failure.- Visceral bias.- Yin Yang.- Strategies to improve critical thinking and minimize cognitive biases/diagnostic errors.

“This book is a textbook explaining our cognitive errors. Its theme is medicine but the same errors occur everywhere. We all need to understand our psychological foibles in order to think clearly about every aspect of our lives and to make the best decisions. Every doctor would benefit from reading this book, and I wish it could be required reading in medical schools. I wish everyone who considers trying CAM would read it first.” (Sciene-Based Medicine, sciencebasedmedicine.org, January, 2019)​