The SMDM Decision Psychology Special Interest Group is excited to announce the inaugural Zikmund-Fisher Decision Psychology Pilot Award Program, which is designed to build connections and grow the community of decision psychologists and related social scientists within SMDM.

Awards from the Z-F Pilot Award Program support new, primary data collections related to applications of decision psychology methods to patient and/or clinician medical decision making. Data may be from experiments, surveys, interviews, observations, or similar. Preference will be given to proposals that address important practical questions grounded in specific health contexts, ideally with immediate real-world implications. E.g.,

• randomized tests of communication formats for decision-relevant medical / risk data,
• comparative tests of alternate framings or presentations of medical decision options
• assessments of associations between patient or clinician cognitive characteristics with medical decisions

Primary outcome measurements should emphasize proximal outcomes such as information recall, contrasting of options, perceptions, emotions, behavioral intentions, preferences, etc. Note that the Z-F Pilot Awards are not intended for tests of shared decision making interventions, interventions to affect the degree of patient involvement in care, etc., although studies testing design decisions for such interventions might be appropriate.