Six Ways Reasoning Fails and a Patient Is Harmed
Six small original glyphs, one per strip: a forked path with one branch ending in a hollow stub; an arrow bending toward a heavy anchor; three plotted points with only the last one filled; a cue square wired straight to an action square with the middle slot left empty; a hypothesis card with three inbound arrows and one outbound arrow to a crossed box marked MISSING; a ticked checkbox beside a flat, unchanged client parameter line.
F1 · Premature closure crit Mechanic: the first plausible explanation is accepted and data collection stops. Harm: a second, faster-moving problem is never seen, and the client deteriorates while the chart says the problem is already named. Correction: name a second hypothesis before you act on the first.
F2 · Anchoring on the admitting diagnosis crit Mechanic: new cues get bent to fit the reason the client came in. Harm: post-operative complications are read as the original problem and escalation is delayed by hours. Correction: ask whether this finding is explained by the admission diagnosis, and if it is not, treat it as new.
F3 · Snapshot reading watch Mechanic: a single value is judged instead of the direction across values. Harm: deterioration gets documented shift after shift and never escalated, because no single reading looked alarming on its own. Correction: never evaluate a value without the value before it.
F4 · Acting before analyzing crit Mechanic: an intervention is chosen straight from the cue, skipping the hypothesis entirely. Harm: the intervention treats a symptom that belongs to a different problem, and the real problem keeps moving. Correction: say the hypothesis sentence out loud first.
F5 · Confirming rather than falsifying watch Mechanic: only the cues that support the favored explanation get gathered. Harm: contradicting data sits in the chart, unread, sometimes for a full shift. Correction: ask what should be there and is missing.
F6 · Evaluating the task, not the client crit Mechanic: the outcome check confirms the intervention was performed rather than that the client responded to it. Harm: a failed intervention is recorded as a success and nobody revisits it. Correction: state the client parameter that must change, and by when.
Watch outF1 and F2 travel together. A client is admitted with one problem, develops a second, and the second is read as the first because the first explanation was closed before the shift began.
Margin notewhich one is YOUR default?
☐ F1 ☐ F2 ☐ F3 ☐ F4 ☐ F5 ☐ F6 — tick the code behind every wrong answer, every practice set.
System-level error prevention barriers → BOOK 01 · P22. Priority frameworks → BOOK 03 · P9.
TakeawayWrong answers on this exam come from six repeatable reasoning failures, and each one has a one-sentence correction you can apply in the middle of an item.