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Category: Project

Description: As medical errors can have significant negative effects on patients’ health and the costs of health systems, there is substantial interest in understanding causes of error for developing prevention interventions (Van Den Bos et al., 2011; Keers et al., 2013). Interdisciplinary research on decision making under uncertainty found that medical errors can occur because of physicians using heuristics that employ a practical method that is not guaranteed to be optimal or rational (Aberegg et al., 2005; Berner & Graber, 2008; Payne & Crowley, 2008; Neumann et al., 2011; Saposnik et al., 2017). While observational studies have suggested that physicians tend to follow the prescription and therapeutic recommendation of colleagues rather than making their own informed decision (Yang et al., 2014; Saposnik et al., 2017), experimental investigations are needed to assess to what extent recommendations by colleagues influence physicians’ decision making. This planned study aims to examine in a web-based experiment with 500 primary care physicians whether they follow incorrect recommendations given by their peers. In the experiment, the recommendation can come from a fellow physician or a consultant. The study will constitute an important step toward understanding the role of social information in prescribing errors. It will be the first study to use an experimental design to investigate the effects of social influences on physicians’ prescribing decisions. While the study will be performed in the primary care setting and focus on prescription behaviour, future studies can use the study design as a starting point to assess herding-like behaviour in different medical contexts and with different samples. The findings of the study could also have practical ethical and legal implications if herding-like behaviour is observed.