In a publicly financed health system, it is important that priority-setting reflects social values. Many studies investigate public preferences through surveys taken from samples, but to be representative, these samples must reflect value judgments of all relevant population subgroups. In this study, we explore whether, next to better-understood sources of heterogeneity such as age, education or gender, also differences in personality play a role in how people want to set limits to health care. We investigate the influence of dispositional optimism: whether someone anticipates a good or bad future. This is an important personality dimension that has been shown to widely reverberate into people’s lives and that can also be expected to influence people’s views on health care. To test our hypothesis, we asked a representative sample of the Belgian population (N = 750) to complete both the revised life orientation test and a discrete choice experiment about allocating healthcare resources, and we investigated the relationships between both measurements. We found that more pessimistic individuals were less supportive of using patients’ age as a selection criterion and more hesitant to invest in prevention. Since individual dispositions are usually not part of the criteria for selecting representative samples, our findings point at a potential non-response bias in studies that elicit social values.

中文翻译：

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优先级设置和个性：乐观配置对分配医疗资源偏好的影响

在公共资助的卫生系统中，确定优先重点反映社会价值很重要。许多研究都是通过对样本进行的调查来调查公众的偏好，但为了具有代表性，这些样本必须反映所有相关人群亚组的价值判断。在这项研究中，我们探讨了除了人们更好理解的异质性来源（例如年龄，教育程度或性别）以外，人格的差异是否也在人们想要设定医疗保健限制的方式中发挥作用。我们调查了性格乐观的影响：某人期望一个好未来。这是一个重要的人格维度，已被证明会广泛影响人们的生活，也有望影响人们对医疗保健的看法。为了检验我们的假设，N  = 750）以完成修订后的生活定向测试和有关分配医疗资源的离散选择实验，我们调查了这两种测量之间的关系。我们发现，更多的悲观者对使用患者的年龄作为选择标准的支持较少，而对预防的投资更加犹豫。由于个人的性格通常不是选择代表性样本的标准的一部分，因此我们的发现指出了在引发社会价值的研究中潜在的无回应偏差。