Cognitive Heuristics in Patient Narratives

In preparation for a Learning Communities discussion on September 18, 2015

The peak-end rule: people judge experiences by their peak (i.e. the most intense point) and their end, rather than the sum or average of every moment of the experiences.

Duration neglect: people's judgments of the pleasantness or unpleasantness of experiences depend little on their duration.

 

Barring conscious self-monitoring, the peak-end rule and duration neglect are powerful and often non-intuitive biases governing most people's thoughts about narratives most of the time. This applies to both patients and their families as well as ourselves and our colleagues. How can we use this knowledge of psychology to enhance our practice of medicine? Such a question can be applied when listening to and assessing medical narratives or when communicating with patients and the rest of our team. It can be asked short-term to a single visit or long-term over the course of months and years.

Some applications may be generally intuitive. When comparing a high-pain, short-duration treatment with a low-pain, longer-duration treatment, the latter is typically preferable, all else equal. Likewise, acutely painful conditions evoke more sympathy than chronic diseases with marginal effects on quality of life. When asking a patient for the severity of pain on a 1-10 scale, we understand that the patient's response will lie closer to the peak than to the average and act appropriately. We are much more likely to receive a fuller description of pain severity ("sometimes it hurts a little, but every now and then it's a 5 out of 10") as part of the patient's narrative in response to an open-ended question, rather than a closed-ended 1-10 inquiry.

On an optimistic note, patient memories of doctor appointments are biased by the peak-end rule and duration neglect. This means that even if visit times decline from 45 to 30 to 15 minutes, maintaining the same high level of engagement, compassion, and interest (especially toward the end of the visit) may have an equally therapeutic effect on the patient. Even a few crucial moments of excellent rapport and empathy can dramatically affect perception of an otherwise uneventful or even troubling appointment. However, moments of poor professionalism or severe neglect in the course of a typical visit may conversely affect patient's memories more than one might expect.

Another important area where these rules may come into play is end-of-life and palliative care. What implications do they have for patient and physician decisions in such situations, and how might we address them? Or should we address them at all? At the very least, we must identify them to answer this question.