Individual Experience with Risk in Medical Decision Making

• Applicants: Dr. Helge Giese; Professorin Dr. Odette Wegwarth
• Subject Area: Public Health, Healthcare Research, Social and Occupational Medicine ; Personality Psychology, Clinical and Medical Psychology, Methodology
• Term: since 2024
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 537476504

The Corona pandemic illustrated again that the public health communication of risks and benefits of medical treatments warrants further improvements. One novel, scientifically discussed option that may deliver this goal is experience sampling, which is designed to illustrate the frequency of negative and positive consequences of a treatment more plastically and transparently. However, current medical decision-making research shows a vast heterogeneity in how this experience sampling is implemented. Furthermore, it remains unclear whether and how this experience sample is integrated with prior personal exposure to the treatment and the medical condition. We thus plan to test in this programme how experience sampling should be designed to provide the most intelligible and impactful evidence-based health communication. To this end, we are going to scrutinize in a first work package how different features of experience sampling affect informed medical decision making. In a first experiment, we will test how the dynamics and abstractness of the experience display and the random process determining the outcome of each experience sample will alter the evaluation of a medical treatment. A second experiment will evaluate whether active decisions in the experience sampling and the visualization of already sampled events will further increase the immersion of the procedure. After the first work package helped optimizing how experience sampling should be presented, the second work package is concerned with how experience sampling can be successfully implemented in medical practice. Major challenges in this venture are the different treatment preferences and experiences of patients and practitioners and that both groups tend to overemphasize their personal experience with the medical treatment of the condition compared to the statistical evidence of the treatment options. Therefore, we will test how general practitioners, patients and a general population control group perceive medical evidence presented in an experience sampling format and compare its effect to common, transparent risk communication formats, such as facts boxes.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants