THE ROLE OF DECISION-ANALYSIS IN INFORMED CONSENT - CHOOSING BETWEEN INTUITION AND SYSTEMATICITY

An important goal of informed consent is to present information to pat ients so that they can decide which medical option is best for them, a ccording to their values. Research in cognitive psychology has shown t hat people are rapidly overwhelmed by having to consider more than a f ew options in making choices. Decision analysis provides a quantifiabl e way to assess patients' values, and it eliminates the burden of inte grating these values with probabilistic information. In this paper we evaluate the relative importance of intuition and systematicity in inf ormed consent. We point our that there is no gold standard for optimal decision making in decisions that hinge on patient values. We also po int out that in some such situations it is too early to assume that th e benefits of systematicity outweigh the benefits of intuition. Resear ch is needed to address the question of which situations favor the use of intuitive approaches of decision making and which call for a more systematic approach. Copyright (C) 1997 Elsevier Science Ltd