Introduction to the Psychology of Medical Decision Making

Join course faculty KD Valentine, PhD, as she leads you through an introduction to psychological theory and empirical research related to making decisions in health and medicine. The psychology of decision making can be used to understand patient and physician behavior and to design behavioral and environmental interventions to improve diagnoses and optimize decision making.

Through lectures, demonstrations, and small and large group discussions, the course will cover:

1. Problems with decision making
2. How the environment we operate in affects our decisions
3. Ways to address decision making errors
4. Practical applications of the lessons from decision psychology

Along the way they will cover cognitive heuristics and their resulting biases, our ability to describe our decision processes and to learn from experience, environmental constraints on judgment, strategies for debiasing, and individual differences in our susceptibility to bias.

Attendees should expect to be actively involved in discussions of psychological phenomena as they relate to their clinical, teaching, or research interests. There are no prerequisites for this introductory course.

About the Faculty:

KD Valentine, PhD, is Research Staff with the Health Decision Sciences Center in the General Medicine Division at Massachusetts General Hospital. She is interested in shared decision making, risk communication, the validity of measurements of decision quality and patient preferences, and patient’s reactions to recommendations and guidelines. Her research program focuses on the application of insights from the psychological and quantitative sciences to create a better understanding of the formation, measurement, and influence of patient preferences in preference-sensitive decision contexts. Her training in decision sciences, risk communication, and quantitative and qualitative analytics, provides her with the unique perspective and methods to measure patient preferences and values, identify how and why these change over time, and how these influence decisions. She holds a Bachelor of Science in Psychology from Missouri State University, a Master of Science in Experimental Psychology from Missouri State University, a Doctorate of Philosophy in Quantitative Psychology from the University of Missouri, and completed a Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Health Decision Sciences Center in at Massachusetts General Hospital.

Register for this course, or the entire Core Course series, here!