Risk-Taking and Professional Responsibility

Diffusion of Responsibility and Level of Risk Taking in Groups.

This study reports evidence supporting the following propositions: (1) Group discussion and consensus concerning decisions that involve actual risk and payoffs lead to greater risk taking than occurs in the absence of such discussion and consensus. (2) The mechanism that underlies this group-induced shift toward greater risk taking consists of a diffusion or spreading of responsibility. Using r...

Beyond Bristol: taking responsibility.

Duty hours and professional responsibility.

Cet article se trouve aussi en français à la page 803. Dear Colleagues, By the time you read these lines, a new cohort of medical graduates will have begun their residencies in family medicine and other specialties. Your College is one of the organizations represented on a steering committee addressing resident duty hours, hosted by the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Canada, with f...

The Role of Responsibility in Strategic Risk-Taking

We explore play between groups where one member of each 2-person group dictates the play of that group and is therefore responsible for the payoff of the other group member. We compare this to play when the game is the same, but each person is playing only for herself. Consistent with the principle of responsibility-alleviation described in Charness (2000), we find that a sense of responsibilit...

Error, blame, and professional responsibility.

It has become common knowledge that health care takes place in complex settings that are fraught with the potential for error. More than this, it is becoming a commonplace understanding that error will occur in hospitals, and that some of those errors will inflict harm on patients and their families. The Institute of Medicine report To Err Is Human, describes error as involving multiple aspects...