The society has a collective consciousness. The beliefs, practices, and attitudes can be studied in the same way as can be an individual mind with appropriate methods. Our society in its attitude toward dental health has been giving it less importance as compared to general health. Lamentably, ignorant dental health care mindset is prevalent in Indian society. There has been a lack of public identification of oral health deterioration and wide acceptance of morbid mouths. Irrespective of how much you inflate your advertising budget or try to convince them, many a time the affected person will turn up only at the time of dental emergency and most of them might just best like to do away with their dental pain. Even a patient with adequate financial resources and education neglects the dental healthcare advice, and very often, most of the patients consider dentists as” doctors” eager to mint money.
Such a negative attitude are termed as “biases” by psychologists. A bias is a cognitive mechanism or mistaken belief that adversely affects a patient’s decision making. One example of a cognitive bias is omission bias, whereby a patient prefers one option because it involves inaction, although this may result in greater harm than taking a particular action. Another common bias occurs when patients prioritize short-term goals over long-term goals, for example, many patients refuse to undergo endodontic treatments and insist on extraction, and fails to acknowledge its long-term effect on oral health. A more common example is a patient, despite, having adequate financial resources refuses a particular treatment because he believes it to be expensive. The problem is social-psychological and is ingrained in the Indian psyche and calls for an psychological intervention.