Cognitive biases are known to operate in patients with various mental disorders. But clinicians can also be affected by cognitive biases that can lead to errors in evaluation and diagnosis.
In cognitive bias, a person’s pre-existing beliefs, expectations, and motives influence the collection and interpretation of information (Ko et al., 2025). Note: Cognitive bias is not the same as ‘‘implicit bias,’’ which refers to stereotyping of a sociodemographic group (Ko et al., 2025).
Metacognition is cognition about cognition. That is, metacognition is the process of thinking about one’s thought processes (Cohen and Burgin, 2016). It is believed that becoming aware of and thinking about the different kinds of cognitive biases that can occur while we evaluate a patient and come to a diagnosis can reduce the chances of our being affected by these biases. In particular, we should be thoughtful about our thought processes when working with a patient whose diagnosis is unclear despite our efforts at carefully evaluating the patient.
Let’s look at some cognitive biases that are relatively common during the diagnostic evaluation of patients (Yager et al., 2022). They are listed below in no particular order.
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