Clearly, information on the PTSD effects of all traumatic events would be preferred over a shortcut. However, the standard shortcut introduces little bias in evaluating the conditional probability of PTSD across individual event types, according to the empirical evidence. [The moderately higher conditional probability of PTSD yielded by the worst event method compared with the random event (0.136 v. 0.092) was due almost entirely to the deviation of the distribution of the worst events from expected values, if all event types had equal prior selection probabilities (Breslau et al. 2004a).]
