In Do doctors understand test results? William Kremer covers Risk savvy : how to make good decisions, a recent book on understanding risk statistics by Gerd Gigerenzer.
You will have little doubt that doctors don’t know the correct risk statistics for very common medical issues (breast cancer screening) and even when supplied with the correct information, they are incapable of interpreting it correctly when you finish Kermer’s article.
And the public?
Unsurprisingly, patients’ misconceptions about health risks are even further off the mark than doctors’. Gigerenzer and his colleagues asked over 10,000 men and women across Europe about the benefits of PSA screening and breast cancer screening respectively. Most overestimated the benefits, with respondents in the UK doing particularly badly – 99% of British men and 96% of British women overestimated the benefit of the tests. (Russians did the best, though Gigerenzer speculates that this is not because they get more good information, but because they get less misleading information.)
What does that suggest to you about the presentation/interpretation of data encoded with a topic map or not?
To me it says that beyond testing an interface for usability and meeting the needs of users, we need to start testing users’ understanding of the data presented by interfaces. Delivery of great information that leaves a user mis-informed (unless that is intentional) doesn’t seem all that helpful.
I am looking forward to reading Risk savvy : how to make good decisions. I don’t know that I will make “better” decisions but I will know when I am ignoring the facts. 😉
I first saw this in a tweet by Alastair Kerr.