Indeed, well before publication of The Person and the Situation, Barbara McNeil and colleagues showed that even experienced physicians were susceptible to variations in the way treatment risks and benefits were “framed.” In particular, the marked preference the doctors attending a conference showed for the less risky but potentially less effective option of radiation over that of surgery that had been evident when the risk was described in terms of immediate mortality rates (i.e., 10% vs. 0%) vanished when the risks were described in terms of survival rates (i.e., 90% vs. 100%).
For the biases paper.
