Effects of expertise and experience on risk judgments

Abstract

Compared the ability of 23 "expert" physicians and 93 undergraduates to accurately judge the risk associated with several diseases. Whereas the physicians gave substantially more accurate judgments, they still systematically overestimated the risks but in a manner different from the students. Two possible sources of this bias were examined: amount of coverage the diseases received in medical journals and the number of encounters with people suffering from the diseases. Greater medical journal coverage for a disease was significantly related to increased physician estimates of the risk of dying from that disease, even after controlling for the true mortality rate. However, subsequent path analyses revealed that the significant journal effect was not robust enough to reject the null hypothesis. The results for encounter frequency were more conclusive. For both physicians and students, increased frequency of encounters with people suffering from the disease was directly related to higher risk estimates. Results suggest that experts and nonexperts may use similar thought processes but make differently biased risk judgments because of their differing exposure to the risky events. (18 ref) (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved)