Sensitizing medical students to impression formation processes in the patient interview

Medical students in a course that included instruction in patient interviewing participated in an experiment devised to alert them to sources of bias which might influence their judgements and management of patients. Students were randomly assigned to one of four groups and exposed to either a videotaped or audiotaped interview of the same patient presented as either normal weight or overweight. Questionnaire responses of students in the two audio groups indicated no detectable differences in the sound tracks of the overweight and normal weight versions of the interview, and these groups were combined for subsequent analysis. A discriminant analysis indicated that students exposed to the overweight video version formed impressions and assessed patient treatment and outcome differently from those exposed to either the video normal or audio versions of the interview. Implications of these findings for medical education are discussed, and suggestions are made for incorporating such sensitization experiments in the medical curriculum.