Earlier this week I spoke at @thoracicrad about how biases affect our evaluations of performance. Here's the gist on how we measure "intelligence" and perceive others.
(I also talked about stereotypes but will save that for another day.)
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First of all, let's start with what intelligence is. There is a ton of variability, but this, from Howard Gardner, resonates with me. 2/
How do we measure intelligence? There are many many many tests. What I learned about human cognitive abilities in my PhD, though, was there's no one measurable "intelligence." There are instead measures, such as the ones on this slide, of specific skillsets.
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Using IQ tests maybe makes sense if you have a fixed mindset and believe everyone has a certain capacity and that's it. But Carol Dweck's work has shown the power of believing our capabilities are malleable and that we can grow.
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Another thing that affects how we evaluate other people is the fundamental attribution error. "People are inclined to offer dispositional explanations for behavior instead of situational ones"
When we see someone DO something rude, we interpret them as BEING rude.
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The person cutting you off on the freeway might be rushing someone to the hospital, for example. In other words, people are acting within the context of a situation. As Nisbett taught us, it's the person AND the situation that matter.
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I also covered cognitive biases (showing my slide and one made by @thoracicrad based on my talk)
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I'll summarize them briefly:
Halo effect: Someone does something good, you forever think they ARE good
Availability bias: You judge based on what is recent or most prominent in your mind rather than the overall performance
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Confirmation bias: You interpret what you see in the way most consistent with what you expected
Unconscious bias: What we've seen/absorbed over time affects our unconscious judgments of others
In-group favoritism: We judge those who are like us more positively
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Negativity bias: The tendency to remember only negative things
So, what can we do to overcome these biases?
1. We need to check ourselves. When you sit down to eval a trainee or a colleague, are you focusing on the negative things? Are you really doing them justice?
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2. Don't assume you know why you are seeing the behavior you are seeing--is there more to the story? Nothing happens in isolation. Work performance depends on many factors aside from intelligence and motivation.
3. Build structures and policy that make it difficult...
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...to insert your biases. For example, use standardized interview questions and work sample tests as part of hiring.
What can you do to minimize the degree to which your bias affects your evaluation of others? What are you doing that works? I'd love to hear it!
On this #IWD21, let’s talk about the data on quality of care by physician gender. I wrote about it for @Medscape (thanks, @eugeniayun!). Please read the piece if you think they should have a recurring gender equity column!
The first major study examining this was in @NEJM in 1993. Researchers looked at visits for almost 100,000 women patients with over 1200 physicians and assessed how often pap smears and screening mammograms were done.
Preparing for this “Master Class,” I reviewed a 2018 Pew study @fumikochino had recently tweeted. They surveyed people on words used to describe men and women and whether they are positive or negative. 🧵
People perceived society to use different words for men than they do for women. For example, “powerful” was mostly seen as a good thing for men and a bad thing for women. Similarly, “strength” was good for men, bad for women. Same for “leadership” and “ambition.”
I mean, do women even stand a chance in the workplace if we’re not supposed to lead or be ambitious??
Quick thread about vaccine distribution—personal story
Mom is in a high-risk category and is eligible to receive a vaccine. I’ve been busy in the ICU and honestly assumed she was signing up to get vaccinated because she’s a responsible, conscientious person.
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After days of meaning to call, I finally remembered at a time of day when we're both awake and asked, just to confirm because of course she’s on it, right?
Nope. She’s not signed up.
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I’m in Arizona right now, she’s home in California. I haven’t kept close tabs on what’s going on with vaccines there (I've been busy), so I ask her why not. She says she doesn’t know what she’s supposed to do.
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Can we all stop playing the suffering Olympics? You know this game. It’s the one where everyone fights with their friends to prove they have it worse than everyone else.
In a world full of suffering, no one wins this competition.
Empathy, on the other hand, may help us heal.
It goes like this:
Person A: I can’t believe I lost my job. I don’t know how I’m going to pay my rent.
Person B: Well, at least you’re still healthy. With my arthritis I can’t even work.
Often Person B goes on to explain how their suffering is more extreme/sad/awful.
This leaves Person A feeling invalidated when what Person A actually needed was some emotional support.
Person B is also struggling and in need of support. Rather than competing about who has it worse, maybe it’s “yes, and”?
The other day, as I was walking into the hospital, I saw that when someone shared one of my tweets as evidence of how real COVID is, another person said mine was a parody account. What, exactly, I was supposedly parodying, I don’t know.
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Here’s what happened that day. We evaluated a new patient early in the morning. He’s in his 80s, and he’s breathing between 40 and 50 times a minute. Try doing that—it’s barely more than a second per breath for both the inhalation AND exhalation.
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He says he feels fine and has no problems with his breathing. But looking at him huff and puff, trying to get oxygen into his lungs and carbon dioxide out of them, we know he’s not fine. And at his age, he can’t exert that much effort for long.
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This thread is based on conversations with doctors at 3 large metropolitan hospitals, all in the position to know what’s happening with their ICUs. Here are some important points that endanger the public’s health NOW in these and many other hospitals across the country.
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Even if hospitals are relatively empty prior to a #COVID19 surge, it is very challenging to manage the surge because of how sick the patients can be, how quickly they come in, and the high volume of deaths.
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If hospitals are already full prior to a COVID surge, it is not hyperbolic to say that more people will die. And in all 3 of these hospitals, that is the exact problem.
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