Teaching the use of framing and decontextualization to address context-based bias in psychiatry

Abstract

The framing effect in medical decision making is a type of cognitive bias that can lead a medical trainee at undergraduate and graduate level to reach a diagnosis or take action based on emotional states induced by the frame in which the information has been approached. This literature review on the framing effect in medical decision making will be done in the context of a case presentation in which the framing of scientific information may lead to conflicting decisions in psychiatry. As a matter of fact, debiasing techniques which help medical students/residents become aware of the fact that they might be easily influenced by the frame used in scientific data, have started to be implemented in medical teaching programs. It is important to incorporate exercises that improve debiasing skills in the curriculum at all levels of medical education. An example of such exercises is decontextualization which consists of improving problem-solving in a non-medical context in order to consolidate the use of the same schema of critical thinking in a medical context afterwards.

Keywords: Decision-making; Decontextualization; Framing effect; Information handling; Medical education; Psychiatric education.