Deliberative versus Intuitive Psychodiagnostic Decision

Aleksandrina Skvortsova,Alan Sanfey,Michael Schulte-Mecklenbeck,Sophie Jellema,Cilia Witteman

doi:10.4236/psych.2016.712143

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.

Highlights

We 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
This study investigated the association between thinking style preferences and accuracy of psychodiagnostic classifications made by novice and experienced clinical psychologists
The results of the current study indicate that a preference for deliberative thinking is associated with better clinical decision-making, but only for experienced clinical psychologists

Summary

Introduction

While it is self-evident that clinical psychologists who have worked longer in the field gain more experience, it has been shown that they do not necessarily gain more expertise in psychodiagnostic decision-making (Spengler et al, 2009; Vollmer et al, 2013): Even after years of experience, clinical psychologists are relatively poor at categorizing mental disorders into DSM categories (Brailey et al, 2001; Schulte-Mecklenbeck et al, 2015) and make judgments strikingly similar to those of novices (e.g., Ægisdóttir et al, 2006; Garb, 1998; Strasser & Gruber, 2004; Witteman & Van den Bercken, 2007).

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