Common sense or cognitive bias and groupthink: does it belong in our clinical reasoning?
Open accessAbstract
You go to a medical equipment shop and buy a stethoscope and reflex hammer for £105. The stethoscope cost £100 more than the reflex hammer. How much did the reflex hammer cost? If your answer to the above question was £5, you may have been using common sense (type-1 reasoning). If on the other hand your answer was based on analytical thinking (type-2 reasoning) your answer would have been more like £2.50. Like most successful biological organisms, we have evolved for economy of effort, to save energy. Type-2 reasoning requires more effort and more time than type-1, so we tend to apply common sense …
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Integrity signals
Registry
Cites
Statistics
Claims the paper makes
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Self-check
Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.
The self-check needs the paper’s full text.
Cites
Cognitive sophistication does not attenuate the bias blind spot.
West, R. F., Meserve, R. J., & Stanovich, K. E. (2012) · Journal of Personality and Social Psychology · doi:10.1037/a0028857 · Cited by 361 · see citing works
Five pitfalls in decisions about diagnosis and prescribing
Klein, J. G. (2005) · BMJ · doi:10.1136/bmj.330.7494.781 · Cited by 289 · see citing works
Case, K. A., Harrison, K., & Roskell, C. (2000) · Physiotherapy · doi:10.1016/s0031-9406(05)61321-1 · Cited by 52 · see citing works
I. Improving teamwork in anaesthesia and critical care: many lessons still to learn
Brindley, P. G. (2014) · British Journal of Anaesthesia · doi:10.1093/bja/aet334 · Cited by 32 · see citing works
Braithwaite, J. (2014) · Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine · doi:10.1177/0141076814523951 · Cited by 9 · see citing works
Flagged first, then by citations
Cited by
Sorted by citations
Muris, P., & Otgaar, H. (2020) · Mindfulness · doi:10.1007/s12671-020-01363-0 · Cited by 162 · see citing works
Groupthink among health professional teams in patient care: A scoping review
DiPierro, K., Lee, H., Pain, K. J., Durning, S. J., & Choi, J. J. (2022) · Medical Teacher · doi:10.1080/0142159x.2021.1987404 · Cited by 48 · see citing works
“A few articles acknowledged the gradual convergence of analytical thinking processes amongst health professionals as further evidence of homogeneity in health care (Mailoo 2015; Harmon et al. 2019).”
BackgroundInfluentialState-of-the-Art Reviews: Safety in Complex Spine Surgery
Sethi, R. K., Bohl, M. A., & Vitale, M. G. (2019) · Spine Deformity · doi:10.1016/j.jspd.2019.04.002 · Cited by 8 · see citing works
Has OpenAI Achieved Artificial General Intelligence in ChatGPT?
Williams, A. E. (2023) · Artificial Intelligence and Applications · doi:10.47852/bonviewaia3202751 · Cited by 7 · see citing works
Enhancing Healthcare Decision-Making Process: Findings from Orthopaedic Field
Schettini, I., Palozzi, G., & Chirico, A. (2020) · Administrative Sciences · doi:10.3390/admsci10040094 · Cited by 3 · see citing works
Using Lean Process Improvement to Enhance Safety and Value
Bohl, M. A., & Kaplan, G. S. (2019) · Springer eBooks · doi:10.1007/978-3-030-31946-5_5
Bohl, M. A., Wright, A. K., Holekamp, T. F., Mecklenburg, R. S., Farrokhi, F. R., Leveque, J., Friedman, A. S., & Sethi, R. K. (2020) · Journal of Clinical Neuroscience · doi:10.1016/j.jocn.2020.10.030
Sutrisno, D. A. (2026) · Asian Anthropology · doi:10.1080/1683478x.2026.2630606
Psychiatrists’ views on pharmacology use for aggression in under 18s: a qualitative study
Thompson, J. J. A., Balazs-Becsi, B., Woodbury‐Smith, M., & McKinnon, I. (2026) · Emotional and Behavioural Difficulties · doi:10.1080/13632752.2026.2633913
Cognitive Biases: History and Definition
Sanabria, A., & Betancourt, C. (2026) · Springer eBooks · doi:10.1007/978-3-032-20377-9_2
User-centered service design approach for self-care using earable devices
Choi, J.-Y., Lee, S., Park, J., Ha, J., Lee, T., Kim, J., Cho, S., & Jeon, G. (2026) · Digital Health · doi:10.1177/20552076261478392
- Authors
- Mailoo, V.
- Affiliations
- Norfolk and Norwich University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust (GB)
- Corresponding author
- Mailoo, Venthan
- Venue
- British Journal of General Practice
- Published
- 2014-12-29
- Volume
- 65
- Issue
- 630
- Pages
- 27-27
- ISSN
- 0960-1643 (ISSN-L)
- 1478-5242
- PMC
- PMC4275986
- OpenAlex
- W2015747201
- Cited by
- 11
- References
- 5
- Citations by year
- 2026: 4 · 2023: 1 · 2021: 1 · 2020: 3 · 2019: 2
- FWCI
- 0.00
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- bronze
- doi.org
- Locations
- British Journal of General Practice (publishedVersion)
- PubMed Central (publishedVersion)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- Topics
- Health Sciences › Medicine › Family Practice › Clinical Reasoning and Diagnostic Skills
- Social Sciences › Decision Sciences › General Decision Sciences › Decision-Making and Behavioral Economics
- Health Sciences › Health Professions › General Health Professions › Health Sciences Research and Education
- Keywords
- cognitive biases, groupthink, clinical reasoning, dual-process theory, common sense, analytical thinking, heuristics
- MeSH terms
- Clinical Competence, Decision Making, Group Processes, Humans, Problem Solving
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review
