other verbatim details. Evidence was also found in consumer research in support of FTT's "editing" hypothesis, namely that extremely low-probability risks can be simplified by gist processing to be represented as "essentially nil." For example, one study found that people were willing to pay more for a safer product if safety was expressed relatively (i.e., product A is safer than product B) than they were if safety was expressed with statistics of actual incidence of safety hazards. This result is in contrast to most prescriptive decision rules that predict that formally equivalent methods of communicating risk information should have identical effects on risk-taking behavior, even if the pertinent displays are different. These findings are predicted by FTT (and related models), which suggest that people reason on the basis of simplified representations rather than on the literal information available. Medical decision-making Like other people, clinicians apply cognitive heuristics and fall into systematic errors which affect decisions in everyday life. Research has shown that patients and their physicians have difficulty understanding a host of numerical concepts, especially risks and probabilities, and this often implies some problems with numeracy, or mathematical proficiency. For example, physicians and patients both demonstrate great difficulty understanding the probabilities of certain genetic risks and were prone to the same errors, despite vast differences in medical knowledge. Though traditional dual process theory generally predicts that decisions made by computation are superior to those made by intuition, FTT assumes the opposite: that intuitive processing is more sophisticated and is capable of making better decisions, and that increases in expertise are accompanied by reliance on intuitive, gist-based reasoning rather than on literal, verbatim reasoning. FTT predicts that simply educating people with statistics regarding risk factors can hinder prevention efforts. Due to low prevalence of HIV or cancer, for example, people tend to overestimate their risks, and consequently interventions stressing the actual numbers may move people toward complacency as opposed to risk reduction. When women learn that their actual risks for breast cancer are lower than they thought, they return for screening at a lower rate. Also, some interventions to discourage adolescent drug use by presenting the risks have been shown to be ineffective or can even backfire. The conclusion drawn from this evidence is that health-care professionals and health policymakers need to package, present, and explain information in more meaningful ways that facilitate forming an appropriate gist. Such strategies would include