Confidence must not always be confused with knowledge. The most knowledgeable are the most humble and unsure because they know that there will always be more dimensions to a particular issue or subject. Such a philosophy has been analyzed by three medical students in a letter that has been published in the Annals of Internal Medicine.
They established the fact by observing that female medicine students answered most of the questions correctly but were less confident in claiming them absolutely right. On contrary, the male students were much more confident but often incorrect in their assumption.
Understanding this relationship between overconfidence and correctness can help in removing the diagnostic errors that are caused by overconfidence. A clinical diagnosis is a subtle examination method that depends upon knowledge and confidence of a doctor in his abilities or right usage of his store of information. Most mistakes happen when this diagnosis is sacrificed on alter of personal whims and over confidence.
The data for establishing the fact was collected through a program called Osmosis. It had included questions from 1021 users (617 women and 404 men) who were asked to answer at least 50 questions and then also select whether they were sure or not. Although women were correct more times than men, they were surprisingly less sure about their answers. The results confirm previous experiments done in this regard to establish the confidence differences in mock clinical scenarios.
The study can help a lot in the future in understanding why some diagnoses are faulty and why some made by particular group are generally right. This can then help in evolving methods to fill the pitfalls. But the glitch is that researchers are unsure about the data that had been collected by Osmosis. Were all the students that gave the answers medical students or not? This is a critical questions. But the Osmosis team has been fairly confident in declaring that the majority indeed belonged to medicine.
