Measuring doctors' self-insight into their treatment decisions

We report two studies here. Both focus on the nature and measurement of sel f-knowledge in judgement making. In the first study we asked 32 British fam ily physicians (GPs) to identify their own policy from sets of policies des cribing their own and their contemporaries' prescription behaviour. They we re no better at identifying their own stated policies than the policies we had statistically generated to describe their behaviour. In the second stud y we measured the information 30 GPs selected while making judgements about prescription. Patterns of information selection were similar to the way th e GPs rated the influence of the information but dissimilar to the pattern of information use as measured in a judgement analysis. The pattern of resu lts in both studies is consistent with the possibility that the knowledge G Ps have is of the extent to which they attend to information. Copyright (C) 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.