Thinking about Thinking

Abstract

The lead article in this issue of the Report proposes an innovative explanation for why the subjects of medical research often seem to have great difficulty accurately gauging whether the research will be medically beneficial for them. The first commentary lauds the paper and examines its implications in greater detail; the second lauds the effort to rethink subjects' capacities for assessing the therapeutic benefit of research but raises questions about the paper's conceptual framework. The article is about how subjects think about the research they're in. The nature of thought is also the subject of the special report, published as a supplement to the issue, on the uses of stories in bioethics. Essays contributed by some of the scholars who have been prominent in narrative ethics try to articulate why and how thinking in terms of stories can be valuable in the midst of a clinical bioethics consultation..