Evidence of Data and Confidence in Clinical Judgments

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Abstract

The literature about research on people's confidence in their general knowledge has usually reported an overconfidence effect (mean subjective probability is higher than percentage of correct answers) with tasks of moderate and extreme difficulty. With easy tasks it has found the opposite effect: underconfidence. However, there are few studies which analyze the relationship between the subjects' confidence and the way they perceive the task, and even fewer which examine this question in higher real-life fields, such as those of clinical diagnosis. For the above reasons, we analyzed people's confidence in a specific context: clinical judgments. And we carried out an experiment in order to study the relationship between perceived information in a set of clinical cases and people's confidence in their diagnostic judgment. We found a linear relationship between them.

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Probabilistic mental models: a Brunswikian theory of confidence.

Gerd Gigerenzer, Ulrich Hoffrage, Heinz Kleinbölting (1991)

Research on people's confidence in their general knowledge has to date produced two fairly stable effects, many inconsistent results, and no comprehensive theory. We propose such a comprehensive framework, the theory of probabilistic mental models (PMM theory). The theory (a) explains both the overconfidence effect (mean confidence is higher than percentage of answers correct) and the hard-easy effect (overconfidence increases with item difficulty) reported in the literature and (b) predicts conditions under which both effects appear, disappear, or invert. In addition, (c) it predicts a new phenomenon, the confidence-frequency effect, a systematic difference between a judgment of confidence in a single event (i.e., that any given answer is correct) and a judgment of the frequency of correct answers in the long run. Two experiments are reported that support PMM theory by confirming these predictions, and several apparent anomalies reported in the literature are explained and integrated into the present framework.