Bias

Synonyms

Partiality; Prejudice

Definition

Faust et al. (1991) and Wedding and Faust (1989) explain chief forms of bias related to clinical judgment and decision-making in neuropsychology. First, hindsight bias is the tendency to believe, after the outcome of an incident is determined, that the outcome could have been more reliably predicted than is actually true. This form of bias suggests that being aware of an event via a client’s clinical history may lead the clinician to conclude that they can determine the outcome of the event and make diagnostic determinations. Confirmation biasrefers to the tendency to seek confirming evidence while failing to consider disconfirming evidence when generating diagnostic impressions. Thus, a clinician seeks to confirm initial hypotheses while failing to gather information related to alternative hypotheses. Moreover, it has been demonstrated that clinicians tend to stop hypothesis evaluation once information in support of an initial hypothesis has...