TITLE:
Deliberative versus Intuitive Psychodiagnostic Decision
AUTHORS:
Aleksandrina Skvortsova, Michael Schulte-Mecklenbeck, Sophie Jellema, Alan Sanfey, Cilia Witteman
KEYWORDS:
Psychodiagnostic Decisions, Experience, Rational Processing Style, Experiential Processing Style
JOURNAL NAME:
Psychology,
Vol.7 No.12,
November
7,
2016
ABSTRACT: Several
studies have demonstrated that in the mental health domain, experience does not
always lead to better diagnostic decisions, suggesting that in clinical psychology
experience-based intuition might actually not improve performance. The aim of
the current study was to investigate differences in preferred reasoning styles
of novice and experienced clinical psychologists as possible explanation of
this surprising phenomenon. We investigated clinical and control decisions of novice
(n = 20) and experienced (n = 20) clinical psychologists as well as age-matched
controls (n = 20 and n = 20 respectively) by using vignettes and MouselabWeb
matrices. We assessed their reasoning style preferences by using the
Rational-Experiential Inventory (Pacini & Epstein, 1999). Results showed
that experienced and novice clinical psychologists did not differ in diagnostic
accuracy and that experienced psychologists had a higher preference for
rational thinking than novices. We also found that in experienced psychologists
a stronger preference for deliberation was associated with greater accuracy,
and in novice psychologists a stronger preference for intuitive reasoning was
associated with less accurate decisions. It might be that it is not a question
of more experience but of deliberation about the task that could help
clinicians perform more accurately.