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Emergency Mind Evidence
How Time Pressure Effects Accuracy
A study exploring how (and why) time pressure makes us worse at diagnosing things correctly.
The Quick Look
The Evidence
“ Factors underlying suboptimal diagnostic performance in physicians under time pressure” ALQahtani, DA, et al. Medical Education, 2018. PMID: 30302783. Find it here.
Question
Time pressure (the pressure we feel from things needing to happen right now) impacts our ability to think and perform optimally — knowing exactly how this works could help us figure out how to build training to mitigate and overcome these effects. In this study from King Saud University in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, the investigators tried to explore whether time pressure leads to suboptimal diagnostic performance (choosing the right hypothesis from among many) via the emotional and physiologic effects of stress on our thinking, or because we simply run out of time and don’t generate enough potential hypotheses in the first place.
Punchline
This study suggests both are probably true, to different degrees. Basically, time pressure likely makes us generate fewer initial options as potential…
