Assessment of quality and safety in rhinologic day surgery.

Objectives: To assess and compare the safety and quality of the management of sinonasal surgery (all procedures) between day-case and traditional admission.

Material And Methods: A 2-year retrospective study included all patients undergoing functional septonasal surgery, ethmoidectomy, middle antrostomy, frontal sinusotomy or endoscopic sphenoidotomy, as day-surgery on inpatient admission. Demographic, operative, pre- and post-operative anesthetic data, complications, and rates of emergency consultation and readmission within 30 days were collected and compared between out- and in-patients.

Decision makers use norms, not cost-benefit analysis, when choosing to conceal or reveal unfair rewards.

We introduce the Conceal or Reveal Dilemma, in which individuals receive unfair benefits, and must decide whether to conceal or to reveal this unfair advantage. This dilemma has two important characteristics: it does not lend itself easily to cost-benefit analysis, neither to the application of any strong universal norm. As a consequence, it is ideally suited to the study of interindividual and intercultural variations in moral-economic norms.

Can mutualistic morality predict how individuals deal with benefits they did not deserve?

An individual obtains an unfair benefit and faces the dilemma of either hiding it (to avoid being excluded from future interactions) or disclosing it (to avoid being discovered as a deceiver). In line with the target article, we expect that this dilemma will be solved by a fixed individual strategy rather than a case-by-case rational calculation.

Reasoning from inconsistency to consistency.

This article presents a theory of how individuals reason from inconsistency to consistency. The theory is based on 3 main principles. First, individuals try to construct a single mental model of a possibility that satisfies a current set of propositions, and if the task is impossible, they infer that the set is inconsistent.

Models of consistency.

This article presents a theory of how individuals detect whether descriptions of an entity are consistent or inconsistent. The theory postulates that individuals try to construct a mental model of the entity in which all the propositions are true. If they succeed, they infer that the description is consistent; otherwise, they infer that it is inconsistent.

Illusions in reasoning about consistency.

Reasoners succumb to predictable illusions in evaluating whether sets of assertions are consistent. We report two studies of this computationally intractable task of "satisfiability." The results show that as the number of possibilities compatible with the assertions increases, the difficulty of the task increases, and that reasoners represent what is true according to assertions, not what is false.

Naive probability: a mental model theory of extensional reasoning.

This article outlines a theory of naive probability. According to the theory, individuals who are unfamiliar with the probability calculus can infer the probabilities of events in an extensional way: They construct mental models of what is true in the various possibilities. Each model represents an equiprobable alternative unless individuals have beliefs to the contrary, in which case some models will have higher probabilities than others.

Focussing in reasoning and decision making.

Our principal hypothesis is that reasoning and decision making are alike in that they both depend on the construction of mental models, and so they should both give rise to similar phenomena. In this paper, we consider one such phenomenon, which we refer to as "focussing": individuals are likely to restrict their thoughts to what is explicitly represented in their models. We show that focussing occurs in four domains.

Mental representation and hypothetico-deductive reasoning: the case of the THOG problem.

This article reports three experiments that deal with the source of the difficulty of Wason's (1977) THOG problem. The solution of this problem demands both the postulation of hypotheses and a combinatorial analysis of their consequences. Experiment 1 showed that the generation of the hypotheses is not in itself sufficient to solve the problem.