Question

Think about the job of an admitting psychiatrist in a mental hospital. This person must evaluate incoming potential patients and, if appropriate, assign each one a diagnosis. In a short essay (up to 500 words), discuss how problems in social cognition (e.g., common biases) might interfere with or alter the decisions of such a psychiatrist. Be sure to discuss social norms, first impressions, attributions, and stereotypes in your answers, and use examples.

(Note: You do not have to discuss particular disorders in your answer. Just consider how biases and other problems in social cognition might interfere with the diagnostic task.)

Textbook being used in the PSYCHOLOGY class is Bernstein 9th edition. Please stick to the topic and be concise.

Answer 1

Incorrect or disparities in mental diagnosis are quite proliferate, especially when one has to use ones cognitive skills in order to narrow down to a specific disorder. This materializes as there aren't clear cut definitions or signs, as there are in medical sciences, to help make a precise judgment. It depends on the perceptiveness of the given clinician to gauge the attributes or be able to interpret the signs and symptoms of a patient with utmost efficiency.

These barriers in decision making and diagnosis occur predominantly due to the same mental faculties that are utilized to make a certain judgment of a patient. Our social cognition, much often than not, impedes ones ability to see through ones biases, which leads to fallacious verdicts. As a doctor in a health institute, there is an automatic presumptuous metaphorical pedestal that one bounds to place themselves on; and, if, that position is threatened by a certain error, which the automatically superior individual (the doctor, in this context) believes to be true, the pedestal can be shattered, so, in order to protect the conflict the arises and alleviate the rising dissonance: the doctor proceeds with a given diagnosis despite it not being the case.

These self serving biases aren't confined to the profession of a psychiatrist, but spill over into each and every professional domain, where there is the prevalence of an expert in a particular field. This self serving bias is the product of ones cognitive processes, which harbors ones need to maintain and feed a certain self construct. This is a cognitive bias which emanates from an individual level in order to to supersede the surrounding identifiers which threaten an individuals ego or self esteem.

The other factor an biases emanate from the collective level, and are perceived thus on the individual level. That is there are certain stereotypes, biases and norms that are created and harbored on a societal level, which are inevitably imbibed on an individual level. When unsubstantiated suppositions become the standardization for a certain ethnic/racial group by a large group of practitioners, it becomes inflexible and makes it, thus, tenuous to look at aspects from a different vantage point, and, hence, objectively - which leads the practitioners (knowingly or unknowingly) to the conduit of misnomers and incorrect diagnosis.

An example of this would be the primary part of the reason why racial profiling is hanging dangerously close on the precipice of loaded biases, and, hence, incorrect accusations.