The trouble with cognitive biases

LITFL • Life in the Fast Lane Medical Blog LITFL • Life in the Fast Lane Medical Blog - Emergency medicine and critical care medical education blog Don’t get me wrong, I am a big fan of Pat Croskerry and metacognition but I do wonder whether the rest of the medical profession has become a bit fixated on cognitive biases. The fact that our errors now have names can lead to recrimination. Ever seen an M&M follow this cycle? Name (the cognitive error) Blame (usually the person isn’t named, but they feel it) Shame (note that cognitive errors have been talked about before) Train (having talked about it again, prescribed vigilance is the take-home point). Even worse is when self-recrimination gets mixed up with self-reflection. Ever seen an M&M given by someone as penance with the take-home point a vow of vigilance, all for an error that if not for the grace of dumb-luck could have been you? They may have second-victim syndrome. There’s actually two psychological schools of thought when it comes to error: So…two somewhat opposing theories of error Human error is the cause of everything Systems faults cause human error Professor of Psychology James Reason postulated that it’s more complicated than that as it’s a complex interplay of both – and he came up with surprisingly effective dairy-based analogy – the Swiss Cheese model of accident causation where each layer of cheese is a layer of defence and it’s only when the latent errors (hol...
Source: Life in the Fast Lane - Category: Emergency Medicine Authors: Tags: Emergency Medicine cognitive biases george douros just culture system error Source Type: blogs