Life and Death:

The Effect of Biases and Heuristics on Medical Decision Making

Abstract

Doctors’ decision making is affected by a variety of cognitive shortcuts and biases. Five biases and heuristics extremely relevant to medical decision making are the availability heuristic, anchoring, sunk cost bias, omission bias, and status quo bias. By conducting literature reviews involving the analysis and evaluation of largely quantitative data, this paper analyses these five biases and the extent to which they affect doctors, as well as the roles they play in medicine. Finally, this paper recommends a range of policies which aim to alleviate the negative effects of these heuristics and biases on medical decision making.