Senchaudhuri addresses some important aspects of the Life STORRIED study, which was designed to test the impact of individualized infographics—either in combination with narratives or without—on patient-centered risk communication outcomes related to opioid and pain prescribing in the emergency department.1
We agree that the mechanism through which narrative impact judgements and decision making not well understood. Narratives or storytelling have been posited to work on patient medical decision-making through a range of mechanisms, including heuristic responses, emotional responses, and narrative transportation theory that states narratives or stories help to transport people to a situation and engage them with the information being conveyed. In addition to an independent effect, narratives may help people to engage with numeric-based information.2,3 Results from our Life STORRIED study suggest that it may be a combination of the two approaches that changes behavior and preferences.
Narratives can cause bias in how persons view treatment options. In the Life STORRIED study, care was taken to provide balanced and varying narratives. Examples included men and women of differing ages, races, ethnicities, and both positive and negative experiences when using opioids to treat pain.4 Ongoing and planned future work from our team seeks to understand how narratives and probabilistic data interact to affect judgements and decisions, including how the impact of these interventions persist or change over time.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The original study was sponsored by the Patient Centered Outcomes Research Institute.
REFERENCES
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