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What patients understand from medical consultations and the processes by which they understand are of considerable clinical and theoretical interest. Empirical research about patients' understanding has been restricted, however, by measures which are inadequate when compared with the depth and complexity of sociological and social anthropological theories of medical consultations. One consequence has been that sociological and social anthropological ideas have been considered largely inappropriate for practical application. A "third party" method of defining the information universe which patients might be expected to grasp from the consultation and of assessing three levels of patient "understanding" is proposed. The method involves judgments about the content of what doctors actually say to patients and what it might mean. Such methods inevitably involve specifying values and therefore make apparent problems of validity which are only implicit in methods where such judgments appear to be avoided. Evidence is presented to show the approach can be reliably conducted. Moreover, the measures described discriminate groups of patients in interesting and predictable ways and help to deepen our ideas about the determinants of cognitive outcomes in medical consultations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Sharing Economy (SE) is a growing ecosystem focusing on peer-to-peer enterprise. In the SE the information available to assist individuals (users) in making decisions focuses predominantly on community-generated trust and reputation information. However, how such information impacts user judgement is still being understood. To explore such effects, we constructed an artificial SE accommodation platform where we varied the elements related to hosts’ digital identity, measuring users’ perceptions and decisions to interact. Across three studies, we find that trust and reputation information increases not only the users’ perceived trustworthiness, credibility, and sociability of hosts, but also the propensity to rent a private room in their home. This effect is seen when providing users both with complete profiles and profiles with partial user-selected information. Closer investigations reveal that three elements relating to the host’s digital identity are sufficient to produce such positive perceptions and increased rental decisions, regardless of which three elements are presented. Our findings have relevant implications for human judgment and privacy in the SE, and question its current culture of ever increasing information-sharing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]