Medical Surrogate Decision Making

Student: Natasha Pepin

It’s a simple concept: sometimes people are bad at making decisions. Often, our bad decisions only hurt ourselves. For example, oftentimes people do not save enough for retirement. However, sometimes people make decisions for others who cannot make decisions for themselves. Many medical decisions are made for people who cannot make those decisions for themselves. Unfortunately people are remarkably bad at predicting the treatment preference that the person would have wanted if able. The current research explores some of the factors involved in some surrogate medical decision-making. Contrary to some theorists, manipulating hope does not necessarily influence surrogates’ decisions. However, these data suggest that those who are more numerate (i.e. have greater ability to understand and reason about statistics) sometimes have different patterns of judgments from those who are not numerate. These results are important for understanding surrogate medical decisions and offer the intriguing possibility of improving surrogate medical decision-making.