The other day we had an hour call with David Lee, one of GE’s health economists (who we mentioned the other day). Anyway, I have about six pages of notes I need to parse and start posting, but this morning I was thinking about something very specific he said: People tend to overestimate small risks. A perfect example is cancer, while any individual’s chance of having it is relatively small we don’t tend to think about it that way. This overestimation can keep us from doing things like getting cancer screenings because we’re afraid of what we might learn.
So … In bed this morning I was wondering whether anyone had studied the effect of knowing this human trait on decision making. Like what happens if you remind people right before you ask them whether they’d like to be screened that all humans tend to overestimate the chances of something that is actually quite rare? Will have to ask David this next time we speak (and if it hasn’t been done maybe we can get someone to do the study). In some ways this feels like exactly the kind of intersection between marketing, health and economics that we can really be helpful in (as marketers).
Just a thought.
Your perception is your reality they say. Lots of traits seem to effect poor decisions. It’s like “the cost of thinking”. You pick up a calculator for a simple math problem, or you know your wife knows the name of some obsucure acquaintance, so you never remember their name. Mental laziness. Have you seen the PSA about the guy asking a million questions about buying his new cell phone, but when he gets in the Doctors office for a check up, he has no questions to ask. Is he embarressed, afraid, or what? We must need to be paid to pay attention to our helth before we get past all these traits.
…my first blog experience btw…back to work!
sounds like biofeedback – conveying information about a patient’s biological functions to him/her in real-time, with the intention of enabling patient to become aware of and possibly control the functions. but in this case it’s (for lack of a sexier term) mindfeedback – conveying information about a patient’s (or patients’ in general) mental functions to him/her in real-time, with the intention of……you get the idea.
interesting.
please let us know what David says…