Synonyms
Partiality; Prejudice
Definition
Faust et al. (1991) and Wedding and Faust (1989) explain chief forms of bias related to clinical judgment and decision-making in neuropsychology. First, hindsight bias is the tendency to believe, after the outcome of an incident is determined, that the outcome could have been more reliably predicted than is actually true. This form of bias suggests that being aware of an event via a client’s clinical history may lead the clinician to conclude that they can determine the outcome of the event and make diagnostic determinations. Confirmation biasrefers to the tendency to seek confirming evidence while failing to consider disconfirming evidence when generating diagnostic impressions. Thus, a clinician seeks to confirm initial hypotheses while failing to gather information related to alternative hypotheses. Moreover, it has been demonstrated that clinicians tend to stop hypothesis evaluation once information in support of an initial hypothesis has...
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References and Readings
Faust, D., Ziskin, J., & Hiers Jr., J. B. (1991). Brain damage claims: Coping with neuropsychological evidence. Marina del Rey: Law & Psychology Press.
Larrabee, G. J. (2000). Forensic neuropsychological assessment. In R. D. Vanderploeg (Ed.), Clinicians guide to neuropsychological assessment (2nd ed., pp. 301–335). Mahwah: Lawrence Erlbaum.
Sweet, J. J., & Moulthrop, M. A. (1999). Self-examination questions as a means of identifying bias in adversarial assessments. Journal of Forensic Neuropsychology, 1, 73–88.
Van Gorp, W., & McMullen, W. (1997). Potential sources of bias in forensic neuropsychological evaluations. The Clinical Neuropsychologist, 11, 180–187.
Wedding, D., & Faust, D. (1989). Clinical judgment and decision-making in neuropsychology. Archives of Clinical Neuropsychology, 4, 233–265.
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Heilbronner, R.L. (2018). Bias. In: Kreutzer, J.S., DeLuca, J., Caplan, B. (eds) Encyclopedia of Clinical Neuropsychology. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-57111-9_949
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-57111-9_949
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