Cognitive Debiasing Strategies: A Faculty Development Workshop for Clinical Teachers in Emergency Medicine

Introduction Medical decision-making is a cornerstone of clinical care and a key contributor to diagnostic accuracy. Medical decision-making occurs via two primary pathways: System 1, pattern recognition, is fast, intuitive, and heuristically driven and occurs largely unconsciously. System 2, analytic thinking, is slow, deliberate, and under conscious control. Biases are systematic errors that can impact reasoning via either pathway but predominantly affect decisions made by pattern recognition. Debiasing strategies involve the deliberate switching from pattern recognition to analytic thinking triggered by a stimulus. This resource describes a faculty development workshop designed to train emergency medicine educators about common biases and debiasing strategies, to improve teaching of diagnostic reasoning to trainees.